


not exactly where i need to be (and yet it seems so close)

by varnes



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2020-10-24 16:44:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 49,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20709269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/varnes/pseuds/varnes
Summary: Richie runs all the way to Eddie’s. He has a bike but he can’t remember, just now, where he put it. Everything feels real, feels — the gravel hurt his shoeless feet, his lungs burn when he gets tired, there’s a cut on his chin that aches a little. It feels real but things always felt real, with It.You can’t trust how you feel or what you see. That’s the core of the terror of It. That everything is real and nothing is real and all of it can kill you.Richie clambers up the drainage pipe and shoves open Eddie’s window. He’s afraid to look. He’s afraid of what It has prepared for him.But it’s nothing. It’s just Eddie, small, young, cast still on his arm. He’s curled up on his side and is using the cast as the world’s worst pillow.“Holy shitballs what the fucking shit,” breathes Richie, lunging forward to fling himself on top of Eddie’s sleeping form. “Don’t scream, don’t scream, hey — Eddie! Eddie, shut the fuck up, you’re going to wake your mom, it’s me! It’s me.”---OR: Richard Tozier goes to sleep on a plane in 2016, and wakes up in 1989.





	1. i'm not what i used to be

**Author's Note:**

> me and richard tozier both after it chapter 2: nice ending. it would be a shame if something ... happened .... to it.

_ friends aren't as friendly as they used to be _  
_not lonely, no_  
_just a little tired though_  
_i'm not exactly where I need to be_  
_and yet it seems so close_  
_walking a mirage with ghosts_

_ **TECHNO WIZARDS | TIME LOOP**  
_

Eddie dies at the end.

Richie doesn’t — the weird thing is that this outcome had never been one that Richie had even considered. It seemed so impossible. Bill, sure. Bev. Fuck, even Stan taking himself off the board, all these things were incandescently sad to think about and remember, but Eddie dying had just never been a _possibility_, when Richie had thought about it, when he had stood in that park and stared up at the fucking clown and thought, for the first time, _holy shit, I am going to fucking die._

He runs his hands down the long spine of the_ E _that he’s just finished recarving. He’d done a pretty good job as a kid, actually. The letters are neat. Eddie would have liked it. He was always getting on Richie’s case for having shit handwriting.

“I don’t know how to write a joke about this,” he says out loud, to the initials.

_You don’t know how to write any jokes at all, jackass_, says Eddie’s voice in his head, but that Eddie is a ghost. The letters are here, they’re real, they’re carved, and when Richie asks them how to make a bridge across the gaping loss of the real, dead Eddie Kaspbrack, they say nothing. Of course they don’t. 

-

Richie goes back to the hotel. He packs his bags. He sits in silence at the Chinese restaurant and lets Ben hover over him, pushing dumplings onto his plate. He lets Bill give his neck a squeeze and promises yes, he’ll keep in touch. Yes, he’ll come to whatever fucking reunion they want him to, just send him the dates.

Yes, I love you. Yes, I’ll call. Yes, I promise, yes I mean it, _yes_, for God’s sake, what are you guys, my fucking mother? I have a plane to catch.

He’s going to be fine, Richie thinks. He’s going to be sad and he’s going to write a joke about how sad he is, and then he’s ... then he’s going to be fine, eventually. You can’t help but overcome; that’s what humanity is, that stubbornness, that getting up every day and letting something fade no matter how badly you wish it wouldn’t. How badly you want to hold the wound open because the wound is what you loved.

But that’s just how grief works. That’s how grief works for everybody, no matter what you lost. No matter who took it. 

He takes a sleeping pill on the plane and looks out the window and as the sun sets he thinks it looks a little like a perfectly round red balloon.

-

And then Richie Tozier wakes up.

-

“You were screaming,” his mother says, voice oddly gentle. “Honey, it was very loud.”

“Sorry,” he answers automatically. He watches his hand reach out, entirely of its own volition, to touch the edge of her cheek. “Sorry. Shit. Mom?”

She blinks down at him. “Who else would I be?” she asks, before ruffling his hair, rising, and leaving the room without looking back. In the doorway her hair catches the light from the kitchen and her hair glints silver. Richie remembers this. He remembers exactly this year, her hair starting to go grey, her eyes going thoughtless sometimes, glazed. He remembers the way she began to look at him every now and then, as if she had no idea who he was. 

He remembers because it gave him nightmares: that one day he would find MISSING posters with his own face, and when he cried _mom! mom! it’s me! i’m right here!_ she would look into his eyes and still not recognize him.

“Mom,” he calls, voice shaking. She pauses in the hallway and looks back, head tilted at an odd angle. “What year is it?”

She frowns, a concerned knot developing between her eyebrows.

“Baby,” she says, confused. “Don’t you know it’s 1989?”

-

Richie runs all the way to Eddie’s. He has a bike but he can’t remember, just now, where he put it. Everything feels real, feels — the gravel hurt his shoeless feet, his lungs burn when he gets tired, there’s a cut on his chin that aches a little. It feels real but things always felt real, with It. The poster in his hand had felt real; the blood in Beverly’s bathroom had felt real; the tear of It’s leg as he yanked it from its body had felt real.

You can’t trust how you feel or what you see. That’s the core of the terror of It. That everything is real and nothing is real and all of it can kill you.

Richie clambers up the drainage pipe and shoves open Eddie’s window. He’s afraid to look. He’s afraid of what It has prepared for him.

But it’s nothing. It’s just Eddie, small, young, cast still on his arm. He’s curled up on his side and is using the cast as the world’s worst pillow. 

“Holy shitballs what the fucking _shit_,” breathes Richie, lunging forward to fling himself on top of Eddie’s sleeping form. “Don’t scream, _don’t_ scream, hey — Eddie! Eddie, shut the fuck up, you’re going to wake your mom, it’s me! It’s _me_.”

Eddie stops screaming, but he doesn’t stop kicking, shoving until Richie falls off the bed with a thud. They both freeze, straining to hear whether Eddie’s mom has woken. The house is silent. 

“_What the fuck_,” Eddie hisses. “What the _fuck_ are you doing here, asshole?”

Richie stares up at him from the floor. God, his voice is _high._ Had his voice been that high? Grown up Eddie had a kind of — not a _low_ voice, but deeper. Well, obviously, Richie thinks; he’d hit puberty. He was an adult, of course he didn’t have the voice of a thirteen-year-old. 

“I think I fucking — time traveled,” Richie says, honest because his brain feels too scrambled not to be honest. Eddie is here. Eddie is alive. Who gives a fuck about being smart when Richie can just say: “Fifteen minutes ago I was literally forty fucking years old and I went to bed on a plane and you were dead and — now I’m here. Holy shit. Holy _shit_.”

_Maybe _I’m_ dead,_ he thinks suddenly. 

Eddie is staring at him. “... Did you do drugs,” he whispers. “Richie if you did fucking drugs and then came to my house I’m going to push you out the fucking window.”

“I’m not on _drugs_,” Richie snaps. God, Eddie was such a _shit_ at thirteen. He’d forgotten how much of liking Eddie as a kid had been tied up on wanting to flush his head in a toilet. “I’m — look, I know it sounds crazy, okay? But I swear to God. I swear to _God._”

Something in his voice must give his sincerity away, because the suspicion drops from Eddie’s face and something else takes it over. He crawls to the edge of the bed and puts a hand out, dragging Richie up with him when he takes it. They sit cross-legged from each other, Richie unable to look away, Eddie peering at him like there was a wound hidden somewhere on his head.

“Okay, tell me,” Eddie says. “I don’t believe you but tell me anyway.” Richie opens his mouth, but then Eddie holds up a hand and scrambles off the bed, going to grab a notebook and pen off his little desk. He repositions himself with the notebook open on one knee, poised to write. “Okay. _Now_ go. I’ll write everything down and then we’ll bring it to the losers club, and then we’ll all decide if you’ve gone totally off the deep end or what.”

Richie picks at Eddie’s bedspread. “I don’t know where to start,” he admits. “Um, and also, I forget a lot, this story is like thirty years worth of shit. It’s — okay, it’s like, we defeated It, but then we sort of ... forgot. I moved to LA. You married your mom — ”

“Okay, fuck you,” Eddie says, starting to put the notebook away.

“No!” Richie snatches his wrist, stopping him. “No, sorry, that’s not ... fuck. I don’t mean you literally married your mom, dude. You, like ... you married someone who looked like her, that’s all. Sorry. It’s habit. Sorry. I swear. Her name was, uh, Myra. She wasn’t your mom.”

Slowly, Eddie returns the notebook to his knee. He writes _Myra._

“I moved to LA, and I was kind of a shitty comedian. I mean I was popular but I — whatever. Bill, uh ... fuck. Bill wrote horror books, and they were also shitty. He was married too, I think. I don’t really remember. Ben got hot, like _really_ hot. I have _no_ idea what his job was because he was that kind hot. Beverly — did something with fashion?” He scrubs his forehead. It’s weirdly hard to remember. Things feel a little fuzzy, hazy at the edges even though it _just_ happened. Even though he’d thought just a handful of hours ago that it would be seared into his brain forever. “Fuck. I’m a bad fucking friend, I barely listened. I was distracted by ... well, I was distracted. There was a lot going on. Shut the fuck up.”

“I literally didn’t say anything.”

“Whatever, fuck you anyway. Uh, Mike stayed in Derry. He was ... well, Mike, I guess. And Stan — ”

His throat closes up.

“Stan didn’t come back,” he says, quickly, like it would hurt less. “And — fuck. It’s so fucking hard to — so we came back, right, because It had woken up, and we tried to kill it, and you got stabbed in the cheek, and then ... and then we ... we did, actually, I guess. We did kill It. I called It a sloppy bitch.” 

Eddie blinks. “A _what_?”

“A sloppy bitch,” Richie repeats. He grins a little. “I was like, you ain’t shit, clown! And then it fucking ... died, I don’t know.”

“What the shit is a sloppy bitch?”

“Look, I can’t explain twenty-seven years worth of popular culture to you, a thirteen year old,” Richie snaps. “But it was fucking badass, okay? Jesus. I forgot you were such a shithead at this age. Also what the fuck, why do my knees hurt so bad?”

Without looking up from where he’s just finished writing _It is a sloppy bitch_ on the notebook, Eddie says, “Osgood-Schlatter disease. You’re probably just having a growth spurt.” 

It’s so nonchalant, so easy, so fucking _Eddie._

Without planning or even consenting to it, Richie feels himself tip forward until he is facedown on the mattress, forehead pressed to Eddie’s ankle. His throat aches. He feels forty and thirteen all at once. Eddie’s dead, and yet here Eddie is, the only version of Eddie that Richie ever really knew, short-lived as his reunion with Old Eddie (_is that what we’re calling it_? he thought) had been.

_I loved you_, he thinks but doesn’t say, breath wet with tears, Eddie’s startled hand soft on the back of his head. _I’d have kept loving you but you died before I could._

“Rich,” Eddie murmurs, hesitant. 

_Jesus fuck, I lost you anyway, _Richie thinks, because: here he is, alive and whole and thirteen fucking years old. Richie is old enough, spiritually, to be his fucking _dad._

“Shut up,” Richie mutters at the bedspread. “I don’t want to talk anymore. Can we just — can I sleep here. On the floor.”

“You don’t have to sleep on the floor,” Eddie tells him. 

Richie pulls back, rolling over so that Eddie won’t see his tear-stained face. “I’m not gonna be Michael fucking Jackson,” he snaps, but of course, Eddie doesn’t get it.

-

In the morning, Richie climbs back down the gutter and goes home before Eddie wakes up. He walks right into his parents eating breakfast; his mother looks at him with a light, puzzled frown but says nothing. His father, cooking oatmeal, doesn’t notice that he’s come in from outside.

“Up early, Rich,” he greets. “Have some breakfast.”

Something small in Richie’s chest pricks him, and he remembers this as well. How kind his dad was, how cheerful, how there was always food in the cupboard for Richie and how he took such diligent care of his wife, as she faded away. How he’d put every part of his heart into it. How there’d been nothing leftover for Richie but kindness and good cheer, when he could manage it. 

Richie’s first bit to land during an open mic was about how he wasn’t scared of having unprotected sex because being a dad was easy: all you had to do was call your kid _sport_ once a decade and the trauma they couldn’t pin on you would mold them into incredibly successful comedians. 

_Me, I’d do it twice a year and get father of the fucking year, _he’d said, and everyone had laughed. Lots of people with shitty dads in that audience, he’d guessed. 

Now, looking at them both, he thinks that they look young. As young now as he — was. Had been. Is? Whatever. They’d seemed so old, the first time Richie had done this. 

“I’m not very hungry,” he manages around a dry throat. “Uh, thanks.”

His dad shrugs. “Whatever you want, bud,” he says. “Maggie honey, are you ready?”

“I can feed myself,” his mom snaps, but makes no move to do so. “Richie, why were you outside without shoes?”

_I remember that you loved me before you forgot me, _Richie thinks, which was another thing that It had taken from him when the memories had gone. They’d forgotten each other, in the end. 

“I wanted to work on my summer feet,” Richie lies. He darts into the kitchen and presses a kiss to her cheek. “I love you. Eat your oatmeal, okay?”

She gives him a look of surprise. “Okay,” she promises. “And—you eat too. Sit.”

“There’s plenty of it,” his dad says, as happy to have Rich there as not to have him. 

Richie sits. He’s not hungry but he takes a bowl from his dad and eats it quietly, watching them. His mother does indeed feed herself, but his dad keeps a hand on her knee the whole time, eyes darting toward her.

1989\. The summer they got the diagnosis. Richie remembers getting a new bike because his mom wasn’t going to be able to drive him to school anymore. 

Jesus. He’d forgotten. He’d fucking —

“I don’t want to see it again,” he hears himself say, standing abruptly. He doesn’t want to watch any of it. He did it once. He did all of this once, and the ending was shit. This movie fucking sucked. 

His dad frowned at him. “See what, son?”

_My life, _thinks Richie.

“There’s this new film showing. Everyone wants to see it but I already know how it ends.”

His mother gives his wrist a squeeze. “Be a good friend, Richie,” she admonishes gently. “Go spend time with your friends. I’m not going anywhere.”

She and his dad exchange glances that Richie would have missed when he was actually thirteen and not lying about it, but he’s almost forty now, and he catches it. 

The phone rings. Richie takes the opportunity to escape up the stairs, back to his room. 

In the light, he can take stock of his room like he hadn’t the night before. His memories are still foggy, though clearer now than they’ve ever been, and getting more clear with every passing second. He feels as old as fucking time, this weird phantom pain in various parts of his body where he’d been bruised by It before he, like, fell through time or whatever it is that’s happening to him.

Honestly, maybe he _is_ dead. Maybe the fucking Buddhists or whatever were right, and he just reincarnated into his thirteen-year-old body. Maybe existence is nothing but a time loop of all your worst summers. 

Richie stares at himself in the mirror. Shaped like a tall person but still short as fuck, lanky, all elbows. Hair too long. Glasses so thick they make him look like he’s got cartoon eyes. His _legs_ ache, right here his shin becomes a joint. He hadn’t considered, really, that forgetting his childhood meant forgetting all the other parts — not just the Losers and It and Henry Bowers but the aches of growing up, the ingrown hair beneath his chin, the very specific bad smell of his shoes. He’s pretty sure that as an adult his shoes don’t smell that bad.

In his closet, all his shirts have some kind of stupid pattern on them, the button-downs all at least one size too big. His dad’s, he thinks, when he tries to remember. They’d had a big yard sale, and he’d found a whole box of them. He’d taken them back upstairs while his mother was distracted and no one ever said anything to him about it when he started wearing them. He doesn’t know if they even noticed.

Staring into the closet, he’s struck suddenly with a memory that even still gives him a squeeze of hurt in his chest. Cautiously, holding his breath, he drops to his knees by the bed and reaches up, under the mattress, feeling around until his fingers hit the edges of a well-worn magazine.

He doesn’t pull it out; he knows what it is. He knows why he hid it separately from his other, decoy magazine box. 

_Oh, Richie,_ he thinks to his younger self, feeling never more an imposter in his own body. This part, the fear, the sense that he had all his secrets emblazoned across his forehead, he’d never forgotten, probably because he’d never outgrown it, not until yesterday or twenty-seven years from now, depending on how you look at it.

It was wrong about his secret, Richie thinks. He’d been afraid of liking boys in 1989, but then, he’d had fair reason to be. He’d have become less afraid, he thinks, if he’d been allowed to remember. If he’d been allowed to build _on_ the summer of 1989, rather than just jumping ahead to being — how far back does he remember? Twenty, maybe? Nineteen? The first semester of college. He went to New York. He hated it in New York but he’d lived there, stubbornly, for a decade and a half anyway. 

There had been so many people he’d known and loved who were out, in the intervening years. Richie thinks — God, he thinks he’d have had a chance of being one of them, in a different life. He lived in _Hollywood_, for God’s sake. Being gay was just something slightly interesting about you, like if you happened to own rather than rent your apartment or if you made a big deal out of being a vegan.

Looking at his thirteen-year-old self, fingers tingling from the edge of the worn-out magazine, Richie thinks: people finding out he liked boys was only the emblematic and most dangerous of the ways that it was possible for Richie to be pried open. 

For Richie to be _seen._

“Richie,” his mother’s voice calls from the foot of the steps. “Your friend is here.”

“Fuck off, Eddie!” Richie answers with a shout.

His door opens. “Fuck off, Bill,” says a voice. “There, now we’ve both fucked off people who aren’t in the room.” 

Richie turns around.

“Stan,” he says, his throat tightening. He wants to throw himself forward into a hug but can’t quite manage it, frozen completely. 

Stan grins at him. “Eddie called me,” he says. “He says you’ve gone crazy.”

Richie shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Cool,” says Stan, letting himself further into the room and dropping onto the bed, making carefully sure to keep his sneakers from getting on the bedspread. “I brought the new issue of West Coast Avengers. Wanna read it?”

This was the Stan that Richie had imagined, when he’d thought about Stan’s suicide. He’d had to; he hadn’t known Old Stan. He’d never gotten the chance.

“Stan my man, that’s ex-fucking-_zactly_ what I want to do,” Richie says, and flings himself down on Stan’s side, accepting one side of the comic so that they can read it together.

“I’m turning the page when I’m done,” Stan warns him. “So keep up.”

“That’s what I said to Eddie’s mom last night,” Richie answers before he can think about it. Man, it really is like riding a bike. 

Stan blinks at him. “That’s what you told Eddie’s mom when you were ... reading to her?” he asks. “That’s kind of romantic, Rich.”

“Shut the fuck up and read, Stanley,” Richie snaps, and makes a show of concentrating. 

It doesn’t matter if he reads slow. Stan always threatens to turn the page, but Richie remembers.

He always waits.

-

“Okay,” says Bill with the kind of authority that only thirteen-year-olds taking charge of other thirteen-year-olds can muster. “So ... wh-whhhhat am I ... l-looking at?” 

The seven of them stared down at the notebook that Eddie had brought, his notes from the night before in neat block letters: 

  * _Time travel  
_
  * _Myra  
_
  * _Bill writes horror books  
_
  * _Richie =/= jokes  
_
  * _Ben is hot  
_
  * _Mike —> Derry  
_
  * _Stan????  
_
  * _Bev fashion  
_
  * _It is a sloppy bitch  
_
  * _Michael Jackson?  
_

“Well,” says Richie, “personally I feel like Eddie didn’t really capture the nuance of what I was saying.”

Eddie jabs him sharply in the side with his elbow. “Fuck off,” he snaps. “You came into my house and then started blabbering on about how you were forty-years-old and, like, hated Michael Jackson now — ”

“Oh, sorry I don’t fucking stan a pedophile — ”

“Stan’s not a PEDOPHILE.” 

“What? No, I — no, stan, _stan_, it’s like — it means you like something, it’s — ” Richie scrubs a hand down his face. The losers are all just ... staring at him, except for Eddie, who looks like he’s gearing up for a fist fight. 

Thirteen-year-olds are exhausting. It was probably wrong to hit them, even if you were in the body of one, right? What was the code of ethics, there?

“Okay,” Richie says, more calmly, raising his hands in the air. “Okay. Sorry. It’s — no, yes, Stan is not a pedophile. Let’s all chill the fuck out. I’m ... I’ll try to explain. It’s hard to do, and also you guys are children, so.” 

Stan peers closely at him. “Richie,” he says, almost gently, “Bill’s older than you.”

“By like _three months_,” Richie snaps, reflexively, then shakes his head. “I mean, _when I was thirteen_ he was three months older than me, but now I am forty, and all of you look like fucking infants. I’m surprised none of you are in diapers.”

Nobody says anything, but Eddie spreads his hands as if to say _how do you like my notes now?_

“Richie,” Bev begins, putting the back of her hand to his forehead, “it’s been a really stressful summer. We’ve all been through a lot. I’ve been having these really crazy dreams — ”

“It wasn’t a fucking _dream_,” Richie interrupts. “Look. How is it more believable that we fought and killed a murderous and magical fucking clown than that I time traveled?” 

“But what It showed us wasn’t ... _real_, exactly,” Mike points out. “I mean it felt real, but it was only real _to us_. It never actually managed to change reality, it just changed how we _saw _reality.”

This is a good point that Richie can’t deny. “It’s not impossible that I am having a whole mental breakdown,” he acknowledges. “Maybe I went to sleep on that plane and instead of waking up sad and in LA they carted me directly to the loony bin, where I am lying on the floor in a straight jacket, hallucinating that all my friends are thirteen years old.”

“Wait,” says Eddie, his voice spiking suddenly. “Wait, if you’re hallucinating, then ... then that means we are, uh ... that none of us are real, right? That I’m just — It’s invention?”

Stan straightens, looking alarmed. Bill and Beverly share a glance, and Ben moves a little closer to Mike, nervous. 

“I feel real,” Stan says.

“_I_ feel real,” agreed Mike. He ruffles Ben’s hair. “Ben also feels real.”

Richie opens his mouth, but Eddie says, “Yeah, I know, my mom felt real last night, fuck off,” he says. 

“Let’s o-operate unnnder the assumption th-that we are all real,” Ben tells them, in that almost-calm way of his. “O-okay. Either Richie is going in-insane, or he’s n-n-not. So, let’s p-p-p-.... prepare for the w-wwweirder one. Richie, tell us w-what you remember, and then w-w-we can make sure to avoid f-ffffuture mistakes.”

Everyone turns to look at Richie, expectant. Stan picks up the notebook and waits.

Richie thinks. Twenty-seven years of stuff, and most of it not relevant — people he’d have dated or not dated, a particular sushi restaurant he let himself get food poisoning at four times before giving up, that party in college where he got so drunk he broke both wrists and didn’t notice.

But none of that matters. What matters is what happened with It. Richie closes his eyes and walks through it: “Mike called. We’d — everyone had left Derry except Mike, and, and, it’s like we’d ... forgotten, when we left. And we had to come back.” 

He keeps his eyes closed, because he doesn’t want to look at any of them. He doesn’t want to be distracted. He doesn’t want to see Stan’s face when he says, “Stan — didn’t come. He ... instead of coming back, he, uh — ”

“I what?” Stan prompts, impatient.

Richie opens his eyes. He frowns. “You ... didn’t come back,” he says again, slowly.

Fuck.

Why hadn’t Stan come back? They’d met at a restaurant. Richie can remember what he ordered but not why Stan wasn’t there. It feels slippery, when he tries to think about it, like having a word on the tip of your tongue but not knowing what it is.

“I’m forgetting,” he realizes. “It’s like, I remember it, but when I try to say it, I ... fuck. Shit. Fuck!” 

Bill reaches out to gently squeeze his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he soothes. “Hey. Richie. It’s fine.”

“_No_,” Richie snaps, yanking his arm away. “It’s not okay, it’s _important_, if I don’t — if this is real and I don’t tell you, Stan will — and Eddie — ”

“Me?!” squeaks Eddie. “What happens to me?”

“I can’t tell you,” Richie says. “When I try to think about it, it’s like — it’s — ”

“Don’t say it directly,” Ben tells him suddenly, voice low and sure. “It’s like how the grown ups couldn’t see what we saw. The blood in Beverly’s bathroom. You’re — if you really time-traveled, you’re forty and thirteen at the same time, right? So you ... you can see the blood but you can’t clean it up. You can remember it but you can’t say it out loud.”

Richie takes his glasses off so that he can dig his palms into his eyes.

“Fuck,” he hisses. “Then how the fuck am I supposed to — ?”

“Stan wasn’t there,” Ben muses. “You forget why?”

“He took himself off the board,” says Richie. “I don’t think I can tell you more than that.”

Stan writes it down. _DERRY, 2016. Stan doesn’t come back. Takes himself off the board._

Looking at it, Richie feels a swell of — he doesn’t know. Something. “Don’t,” he says to Stan directly. “When it ... when the time comes. Don’t do that.”

Stan meets his eyes searchingly, then nods once. He writes. _Stan should make a different choice._

“Okay. What else?”

“Bev. She had bruises.”

Beverly flinches. “From what?”

Richie shrugs helplessly. “I think I knew. But I didn’t ask.”

_Beverly came back with bruises_, Stan writes, _and won’t say where they’re from._

“That’s not very helpful in knowing how to avoid them,” Mike points out, frowning.

Beverly examines her nails. “Yes it is,” she says, and then doesn’t elaborate.

“All Bill’s books had hackey endings,” Richie remembers, “And Mike was stuck in Derry and Ben — actually, Ben was doing great. He got really hot.”

“Richie really can’t shut up about how hot you get, Ben,” says Eddie. He jabs Richie’s side again. “We get it.”

_Bill can’t write a good ending. Mike is stuck in Derry (librarian). Richie thinks Ben is hot._

“Don’t fucking write that,” Eddie snaps. “That’s so pointless.”

“Yeah, what _else_ am I?” Ben asks, looking a little put out. “Looks aren’t everything.”

“That’s such a fucking hot person thing to say,” Richie tells him. “God, it’s like you’re in training already.”

Eddie gives Richie another shove until he turns back to look at him. “And me?” he asks. “What about me? What do I need to do?”

Richie wants to say _don’t marry Myra_. He wants to say _don’t forget me._ He wants to say a million things, but this Eddie is thirteen, and when he tries the memories get wispy and hard to focus. 

It’s not Richie’s job to make Eddie love him, he thinks. It’s probably kind of a fucked up thing to do, actually, given — well, given everything. But he can keep him alive, maybe. He can keep Eddie alive if he can just figure out how to say the right thing.

Richie says, “Don’t save me, Eds.” 

Eddie blinks. Stan stops writing.

“What?”

“Don’t — ” Richie swallows. “Don’t save me. I don’t remember what happened. I don’t know why I was just ... I don’t know. But don’t.”

_Eddie shouldn’t save Richie_, Stan writes.

“Don’t write that,” says Eddie. “What the fuck.”

“You can ignore it if you want,” Stan points out. “Nobody else liked theirs, either.”

Eddie makes a small, irritated sound, and turns away. “Whatever,” he mutters. “Fine. What’s Richie’s, then?”

That one’s easy, actually. “I should write my own jokes,” he says. “The ones I had before were shit.”

Stan writes it down. The seven of them lean in, a tight circle, heads touching. Now that he’s said it out loud, the past feels farther away, more dreamlike. A memory he knows was real but has had the edges taken off. He wonders if it’s going to always be like this, if every day things will feel farther. He wonders if this was what forgetting had felt like the first go around.

Richie looks at the list, combined with the other one: 

  * _Myra  
_
    * _Eddie shouldn’t save Richie.  
_
  * _Bill writes horror books  
_
    * _Bill can’t write a good ending.  
_
  * _Richie =/= jokes  
_
    * _Richie should write his own jokes.  
_
  * _Ben is hot  
_
    * _Richie thinks Ben is hot.  
_
  * _Mike —> Derry  
_
    * _Mike is stuck in Derry (librarian).   
_
  * _Stan????  
_
    * _DERRY, 2016. Stan doesn’t come back. Takes himself off the board._ _Stan should make a different choice.  
_
  * _Bev fashion  
_
    * _Beverly came back with bruises_ a_nd won’t say where they’re from.  
_
  * _It is a sloppy bitch  
_
  * _Michael Jackson?  
_

“Oh yeah,” he says. “That was the most important thing. To kill It. We just had — I mean, there was other stuff, a ritual of ... something, I don’t know. Chode? That can’t be right. Anyway, it was Mike’s dumb idea and it didn’t work. But we did kill It.”

Mike, looking fairly peaceable for a man who’s been insulted without knowing why to be able to defend himself, asks, “How?”

Richie closes his eyes. He tries to hold onto it. 

“Fear,” he says, carefully. He doesn’t want to lose it all, because if it happens again, he wants to know. He wants to have it, still. “It’s only ever as big as your fear is.”

Stan writes: _No one’s afraid of a sloppy bitch._

“W-w-well,” muses Bill, optimistic. “I guess it-it-it’s as g-good a place as anyw-whhere else to start.”


	2. keep moving forward but i'm stuck in the past

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s possible that you don’t stop loving people, Richie thinks; you only tuck them away someplace safe, where it doesn’t hurt to look at them after they’re gone.
> 
> or: _GATORADE: FIND YOUR FLAVOR._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY GUYS PLEASE READ ME. first, i full forgot that in the movie they were aged up to 13, because basically in my own life ages 10-13 blend together completely. anyway, i fixed that, just pretend they’ve been 13 this whole time. this is a fanfiction i’m allowed to do that.
> 
> secondly, and much more importantly, this chapter talks fairly in depth about a bunch of really intense stuff!!! i know you've all read IT and you've seen the movie so you know about the realness of shit but you gotta also take care of yourselves, so, just to be safe, content warnings for: 
> 
> \- reference to suicide ideation  
\- reference to anxiety/depression  
\- reference to disordered eating  
\- some latent homophobia
> 
> TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES, love u bye.

They go to the quarry after. The vibe is a little weird, but then, Richie supposes the vibe had been a little weird that whole summer. The vibe has been weird for the entirety of Richie’s stupid life.

“You gonna swim?” asks Ben at the water’s edge. Mike has Beverly on his shoulders, taking on Bill and Stan in chicken. Eddie is what could generously be called refereeing but is closer to heckling from the side. Sometimes it’s unbelievable to Richie that _he_ got called Trashmouth when Eddie Kaspbrak was running around town just _constantly_ talking shit. 

He only got away with it because he was small and cute and Richie — well, Richie did _look_ like the kid you’d call Trashmouth, to be fair.

He shrugs. “Probably in a bit,” he says. “Don’t really feel like it yet.”

Ben nods agreeably. He’s still in his clothes, arms folded over his stomach. “So, um. You said — I get hot?”

“Hotter than you are now,” Richie jokes, nudging him gently with an elbow. “Seriously dude, I don’t want to overhype it, but like, I knew an evil clown was trying to kill us all and I was _still_ mostly thinking about how many visible abs you were hiding under your shirt.”

Ben’s laugh a quiet, and a little distant. “Do you know ... how?” he asks, and when Richie looks at him, he can see that his cheeks are pink. “Just — my mom is always putting me on these diets, and they don’t seem to work. I don’t know.” 

Richie blinks. He doesn’t think he’d ever considered that Ben might have been consciously trying at any point to lose weight. He was just ... Ben. Chubby and soft-spoken and genial, all the time. Even when he was hot he still had that vibe, like no one had told him that he wasn’t still the kid bullies called Fat Boy.

“I didn’t know your mom put you on diets,” he says. 

Ben shrugs. “She wants me to be healthy,” he explains. “We do, like, weigh-in Wednesdays and stuff. She does all the diets with me out of like, solidarity or whatever. But none of it — I mean. It’s not like I’m not trying.”

Richie tries and fails to remember what Ben’s mother looks like. Is she overweight? He can’t picture her. He doesn’t even know if Ben looks like her or not. “Sorry, man, I didn’t have time to ask about your workout regimen,” he admits. “But — I mean. You can relax. At some point, something clearly works.”

“What was I eating? At the restaurant? You said we met up for Chinese, right?”

“Ben, buddy. I wasn’t paying attention to what you were eating. I don’t know.”

Ben nods. He looks thoughtful. “Was Bev there?”

“Yeah,” Richie grins. “Bev was there. She also thought you were hot. I’m telling you, man, your future is bright.”

Ben nods at him, smile small but real. His arms are still crossed across his stomach. Richie feels stupid for never considering that Ben might have, like, known he was chubby. Or — not that he didn’t think he knew, but he’d never given much thought to the fact that Ben had to be chubby all the time, and knew that people knew, and that everyone who saw him had an opinion about it. Richie hadn’t even realized other people thought about his own physical shape at all until, like, puberty hit and he started having to shower more often because his sweat stank so bad.

“Hey, man,” he says, a twist of guilt tightening in his gut. “You, uh. I mean. You look fine now, too.”

Ben gives him a sardonic look. “Yeah, of course,” he agrees, easy as anything, soft and cheerful as ever. Richie frowns.

“Ben,” he says. “Seriously. I mean it. You’re thirteen. All of us look like chodes. Seriously, I’ve got hair, like _inside_ my — ”

“Okay, that’s probably enough information, Rich,” Ben interrupts, laughing. He peels his shirt off and nudges Richie toward the water. “C’mon, let’s take winner.”

“I’m just saying,” grumbles Richie. “I forgot how much being a teenager fucking _itched_. Does everybody else itch this much?”

Eddie turns away from where Bev and Stan are locked in combat, grinning like Richie has handed him some kind of a gift. “No, you’re just gross,” he announces cheerfully.

“You’re only saying that because you haven’t _hit_ puberty yet,” Richie volleys back. He’d forgotten how fun it was to argue with Eddie. No wonder he’d grown up to be such an asshole; he was always trying to find someone who could fight back. “It’s okay, Babybrak. One day your dick, too, will grow.”

“My dick is fine,” Eddie snaps. “At least it’s not diseased, like yours.”

“I’ve only got what your mother gave m—augh!” Richie is cut off by the impact of Beverly and Mike toppling over onto him. He goes under, limbs tangled with the two of them, all three sputtering back to the surface. Beverly’s hand ends up in his mouth, Richie’s arm looped around Mike’s neck. When he manages to get the water out of his eyes, he sees Eddie laughing so hard that Bill has to support him with an arm looped around his waist to keep him from drowning. 

Bev withdraws her hand and uses it to pat Richie’s head. “Sorry Trashmouth,” she apologizes with an easy grin. “But to be fair you didn’t even _try_ to dodge.”

“I was distracted!” Richie protests. “I was busy owning this thirteen-year-old!”

“I don’t know what your obsession with my dick is,” Eddie grumbles, and Richie does his best not to freeze, because it’s one thing for Old Richie to know who he is and a complete other to — out Young Richie, or whatever. He feels a kind of distant sense of responsibility for the skinny little douchebag whose body he’s borrowing.

He’s saved from answering by Mike saying reassuringly, “I’m sure everyone’s dick is fine. Except Bev, obviously.”

“Leave my dick out of it,” says Bev. “I’ve got the biggest dick here.”

“Okay, sure,” Mike answers placidly, “but maybe we can stop talking about dicks now. That’s just an idea I had.”

“Seconded,” Stan pipes up. 

“Thirded,” says Ben. “Everyone needs to calm down about their dicks.”

Richie stares at him. “Benjamin, nobody in the entire history of the world has ever found any degree of chill about their dicks. That’s like, what most nonfiction books are about.”

“You don’t read nonfiction books,” scoffs Eddie.

He has a point, because Richie doesn’t, in fact, read nonfiction books. Actually, Richie doesn’t really ... read. He’d stopped reading comics when he left Derry; it had always been something he’d done with Stan, and something he’d forgotten without him. Still, they don’t need to know that. He’s not about to get wrecked by a pretentious infant with a severe case of hypochondria. 

“Eleven-year-old me didn’t read but I’ve had like, twenty-seven years to play catch up,” he lies. “I’m like a scholar now, bitch.”

“Tell me one fact about history,” Stan goads flatly. “Like just one. When was the war of 1812.”

“1813,” Richie says sarcastically. “Et tu, Stanley? I went to your Bar Mitzvah and this is the thanks I get?”

“Honestly, I wish nobody had been at my Bar Mitzvah. I wish _I_ hadn’t been there.”

“We all wished that. Your reciting was terrible.”

“Shut up, Richie.”

Richie opens his mouth to respond, but before he can he feels the weight of Bill leaping onto his back from behind, sending them both careening into the water. When he splutters to the surface, Bill is waiting, grinning big, and sweeps his arm across the top of the water to splash him full in the face. Instinctively, Richie splashes back, missing slightly and catching Ben, whose laugh turns into a cough and who then launches himself in Bill and Richie’s direction. 

Soon it’s just a tangle of them, and Richie has no idea who he is splashing except that at some point he realizes Eddie has drifted behind him, using him as a shield. That’s all right, Richie thinks. He doesn’t mind. 

The sun is bright and the water is warm and his friends are here, all of them, alive and young and unharmed, and Richie laughs in delight as Eddie clambors up onto his shoulders to escape Bev’s attempt to dunk him. 

_I’m going to save you_, Richie thinks at them, heart cracking open, sunshine pouring in. 

-

They split up to go home and dry off; the fair is staying open late and everybody wants to go but nobody wants to go with wet clothes, so they agree to meet by the ferris wheel at eight and break in different directions. Stan follows him home, though Richie knows he’s probably dying to go back and do a full-body shower, including shampoo and a tick check. Richie doesn’t really want to have whatever capital-T Talk is percolating in Stan’s brain, but Eddie was giving him a look like he was going to want to pepper him with questions, and Richie is having this problem where his thirteen-year-old body wants to kiss the shit out Eddie’s thirteen-year-old face, but his forty-year-old brain wants to put himself in prison for it. So he lets Stan wave Eddie off and they walk back to town together, Richie’s hands in his pockets.

“So we didn’t kill It,” Stan says, voice quiet as he kicks a little rock ahead of him. “When we — I mean, It comes back.”

Richie shrugs. “I don’t know how to make this better for you, man,” he admits honestly. “I don’t know what was going through your head or how to convince you to come back or what it was like, for you. I just ... I don’t know what the fuck to say. And even if I did know what to say, every time I try to say anything it’s like it turns to Jell-O and I accidentally swallow it.”

Stan gives him a long, discerning look. “You really aren’t you, are you,” he murmurs. “I mean like. You’re really — not a kid.”

“To be fair, Stanley,” Richie jokes without being able to help it, “you were born, like, fifty-five years of age, spiritually. I honestly don’t know why they even bothered with a Bar Mitzvah for you, you probably came out of your mom with a fully grown mustache.” He says _mustache_ with a British accent and it comes out the way it had when he was thirteen. Fuck. He’d actually gotten good at that one.

Stan rolls his eyes and gives Richie a shove before returning his hands to his pockets. “It’s weird,” he decides. “It’s really. I don’t know. Fucking weird.” 

Richie nods. He shoves his hands in his pockets in a mimic of Stan’s stance, dropping back so that they’re walking side-by-side. He tries and fails not to openly stare at Stan’s profile; at the dear and messy twist of his hair, the point of his nose, the way his mouth twisted a little when he was thinking. 

Richie knows that he forgot Stan because of It’s magic, but that feels so impossible now, looking at him. Magic seems so inconsequential in the face of how much thirteen-year-old Richie had loved him, of how much thirteen-year-old Richie had wanted, in his own way, to protect and be protected by him.

Stan was always scared but he was brave, too. You _had_ to be scared to be brave, didn’t you? Wasn’t that the whole thing? Richie had been too stupid to be scared, or maybe just too careless. He’d never been overly worried about the actual reality of being alive or being dead; he never liked pain and in some vague sense he liked not being dead, but it wasn’t visceral for him, the way it was with Stan, whose anxieties loomed over him in constant reminder that — what?

Richie didn’t know. Richie had never asked.

“You, uh ... do you want to talk about it?” he offers, feeling awkward about it. “I mean, not about me, or I guess we can talk about me, but is there ... I don’t know, man. Other stuff. That you want to talk about.” 

Stan stops walking. He gives Richie a long look, then smiles a little, shrugging. “No offense,” he says, “but not with you. Maybe if my Richie comes back. But you’re just a grownup in disguise.”

Richie is surprised by how much that stings, even though Stan is objectively right: this Richie isn’t Stan’s friend Richie; Old Richie is just borrowing him. 

“Look, I’m not having the best time either, man,” he says, a little grumpier than he means to. “My balls itch, like, _all the time_ in this body. Puberty fucking sucks.”

Stan laughs and knocks their shoulders together, walking again. Richie has to jog a little to catch him. When he does, Stan keeps his eyes on the ground as he admits, “Yeah, but I miss you, kind of.” 

Richie blinks. “I — you what?”

Stan shrugs, not quite meeting Richie’s eyes. “I dunno. You’re just different. You but like ... ” He makes a helpless kind of gesture and gives up trying to say it, glancing quickly at Richie and then away, like he doesn’t want to see if he’s hurt Richie’s feelings.

The thing is, Richie has no idea what’s happening to him. He doesn’t know if he’s visiting for a limited time or doing it all over again; doesn’t know if his adult memories will fade the longer he’s here; doesn’t know if any of this is happening or if it’s just an extended psychotic break that he’s having while on a plane from Maine to California; doesn’t know shit about shit, honestly, which in an odd twist is the one thing that he has in common with his thirteen-year-old self.

But if it is real. If he really is here. If he forgets, and everything happens just like it did before.

Now that he isn’t trying to say it, Richie can remember: Old Stan, getting into a bathtub instead of onto a plane. Old Stan thinking he was saving them by taking himself out of the game because he’d always outsized his flaws without much regard for his assets.

“Hey Stan,” he blurts, reaching out to grab Stan’s wrist. He tries to find the right words, to say it without losing it. But he — maybe it’s selfish, but he doesn’t want to be the one to carry it, he doesn’t want to be the one who knows because Richie is too fucking stupid to be responsible for it. He’s never been good at planning, or strategy, or anything other than impulse; back when he made his own jokes he never wrote anything down except a couple bullet points to remind him of what he wanted to talk about. He was always better off the cuff.

And then he’d had one terrible night, just a total bomb, and his agent had said —

“I kill myself, don’t I,” Stan guesses, in a calm, terrible voice. “That’s what you meant when you said I ‘took myself off the board.’ I was too scared to come back, so I killed myself.”

Stan is smarter than Richie. He’s always been smarter than Richie. He’s always been better at seeing how things come apart and get put back together.

_He’s thirteen_, Richie reminds himself. _This is such a fucked up thing to do to a thirteen-year-old. Be the grownup, man. For once in your fucking life just be a grownup. _

Stan is just looking at him, waiting. Richie doesn’t have to say it. Richie doesn’t _have_ to say anything, but Richie has always kind of been a piece of shit. Getting older didn’t change that; it just made him a slightly older piece of shit. 

He says, “Yeah, buddy,” and just like that, something spools out of him, the pinch of the words loosening. It feels — farther away. Hazy. Richie feels like he’s trying to remember a dream, even though he knows he isn’t, that it happened, somewhere, in some timeline, in some universe. 

Stan says nothing. He is completely still, no longer walking, no longer doing anything at all, just staring at Richie like he’s just unzipped the universe and shown Stan what’s outside it.

“So, don’t ... don’t do that this time,” Richie follows up quickly. His throat feels tight, not for the increasingly hazy memory but for Stan, this Stan, the one standing at a dirt road knowing suddenly something terrible. Richie shakes his head to try and rid himself of the vision of this kid in a bathtub, this kid getting a phone call and deciding he was a better asset to the team if he didn’t show up to the game. And he just — he knows it was Old Stan, he knows it’s not fair to take all of Old Stan’s twenty-seven years of growing up away, but he’d never met Old Stan. He only knows this one, with wrists small enough that he can wrap almost his whole hand around them.

He doesn’t let go. He isn’t sure that he can. His hand feels frozen in place. Stan would have to cut through it, if he — if he still wanted — 

Stan nods, slowly, eyes a little vague. “Yeah. I mean. I’ve thought about it, I guess. Not thought about _doing_ it, just thought about, like ... what it would be like not to ... I don’t know. Feel like this.” 

Something hollows out in Richie’s stomach. “Stan.”

Stan lets out a long, quiet sigh. He looks away, out into some middle distance that Richie can’t see. “I’m anxious _all the fucking time_,” he admits. “It’s like ... it’s like even when there isn’t something specific to be scared about, there’s just like this sense of dread constantly in the pit of my stomach, all the time, waiting. And there’s no amount of logic that can make it go away. So I guess ... I dunno, I guess I understand. Why he did it.”

“_Stan_,” says Richie. “Hey, man. No. Listen to me.”

Stan tries to shake him off. “It’s fine,” he says in a way that clearly broadcasts how not fine it is. “Honestly, like, I guess it’s a relief to just. Know. But I kind of just wish I hadn’t totally screwed you guys.”

Richie tightens his grip. Fuck. _Fuck._ This was why Richie was the worst choice to come back; probably why Richie was the one It sent. Of course he’d fuck it up. Of course he’d make everything immeasurably fucking worse.

It’s so fucking ... weird and hard, because Richie _feels_ thirteen. Looking at Stan, right now, he just feels like — he knows he’s forty but he doesn’t _feel forty_. He feels like a thirteen-year-old who happens to remember a bunch of shit that hasn’t happened yet. 

It hits Richie that he doesn’t think he knew, until now, how much he’d looked the fuck _up_ to Stan, as a kid.

But that’s — so much, isn’t it? Too much to ask a kid to hold. 

He takes a big, gulping breath. He closes his eyes, swims through the haze of his memory. He gets that slippery feeling again, like trying to carry water in your hands. But this is Stan, and Richie can save him, maybe, if he just — if he just gets this _one thing_ right.

It comes to him suddenly, the way punchlines do: he doesn’t have to carry water if he can carry Gatorade. He doesn’t have to tell Stan the truth if he can tell him a lie that’s close enough, that will convince him anyway. Richie has been lying his whole career about what his life was like, and he told that lie so many times that it became, for all intents and purposes, true.

_Fuck you, clown,_ he thinks.

“_No. _It wasn’t — look, I didn’t want to say anything before, because you’re just a kid. But the truth is you’d found this ritual, and it said we needed a sacrifice, so you — so you thought the sacrifice could be you.”

Stan stops trying to get free of Richie’s grip. He’s so _young_. 

“You made a plan, you had this whole—but it was a shitballs plan and a bunch of us died. So let’s come up with a new one, okay buddy?”

“What if we come up with a new plan and _all _of us die? You said we—you said you guys killed It, in the end. So maybe the plan worked.”

Richie shrugs. “Yeah, maybe, but look, man. Of the two of us, only one has had to live in the world without you, okay, and it fucking sucks huge balls. Let’s die together or not at all, all right?”

Stan shifts, not pulling away but turning his arm so that he’s gripping Richie’s forearm, too. Richie thinks maybe he’s gearing up to say something, but it turns out he’s just staring down at their hands because — oh, good. He’s made Stan cry. 

Richie tugs him forward into a hug, horrified and exasperated at the same time. He awkwardly gives his back a pat. “Hey, uh, stop,” he says. “I don’t know what the fuck to do when kids cry.”

Stan laughs a little, and hugs him back, arms coming around Richie’s middle and squeezing tight.

-

_Right,_ Richie thinks, seated at his dumb little desk after dropping Stan back at home. His parents aren’t home; there was a note in the kitchen saying they’d gone to a doctor’s appointment. He thinks this summer was the last one where his dad remembered, consistently, to write them. His mom had always been the better organized one, which obviously got shot to hell as things got worse. So Richie had taught himself not to worry. She’d be fine until she was someone who didn’t recognize him and who he didn’t recognize, and then, one day, she’d be dead, and Richie’s dad would move to Blue Hill, and they’d exchange Christmas cards forever and never talk on the phone. And that would be it.

Richie remembers his face on the _MISSING_ poster. Kind of an obvious metaphor, from It, who was usually admirably creative, but at thirteen it had hit the mark. Richie, missing from his own life, his mom and dad in a world that didn’t include him anymore and never would again.

Honestly, It didn’t even need to do the whole business of teeth and deadlights to beat kids down. Life was brutal enough. 

Richie looks down at the half-full school notebook that he’d found stuffed in one of the desk drawers. He hadn’t taken very good notes, which was not surprising. He writes:

_RULES_

  1. _If they guess, you can confirm it.  
_
  2. _The more they know, the less clearly you remember.  
_
  3. _You can lie.  
_

Pretty simple, he thinks. He still knows that Old Stan had killed himself, but increasingly it feels like he only knows his because they’d talked about it this afternoon. And yet despite that, he has no problem discerning the truth from the things he’d lied about; so, logically, the more the Losers know, the less Richie does.

_Gatorade, not water_. He just needs to find the right flavor for everybody. To convince them to make different choices without telling them what their original choices were. It can’t be that hard; they’re thirteen. Thirteen-year-olds are gullible as shit. Someone had told Richie at thirteen that 90% of restaurant french fries had spit on them and he still can’t eat them.

He writes:

_4\. _ _GATORADE: FIND YOUR FLAVOR._

He can do this, probably. Richie has never been very good at basically anything except lying to people about who he is and who they are to him — in a weird way, his old life has uniquely prepared him for this task. If It thought sending him here was the right move because Richie was bad at most parts of fighting It, then It had miscalculated. Because Richie might not be smart or brave or kind or good, but he’s a fucking good liar.

“Game on, clown,” he mutters.

-

The fair looks just like Richie remembers it: smeared with bright colors, too much sugar, cigarette smoke, and the constant sound of someone puking by the Tilt-a-Whirl. Teens in dark jackets huddle by the arcade games, furtively exchanging cigarettes, weed, and occasionally handjobs. There aren’t any red balloons. Richie doesn’t know if he’d noticed that before.

Bill and Bev get on the ferris wheel, much to Ben’s obvious dismay, who gets saddled with sitting next to an Eddie who is clearly convinced his seat is going to break and they’re all going to tumble to their deaths. 

“You don’t have to ride it,” Ben reminds him patiently in line, eyes boring holes into the back of Bill’s head. Bill, whose hand is twitching nervously toward Bev’s but never quite touching it, does not seem to notice. “Stan’s not riding it.”

“Stan’s afraid of heights,” Eddie says dismissively. “_I’m_ afraid of faulty _infrastructure_.”

“That sounds like a really good reason not to ride a shitty old ferris wheel,” sighs Ben, and finally turns to look at him. Eddie holds out his funnel cake in offer. Ben eyes it for a long moment, then says, “No thanks, I’m not hungry. Would it make you feel better if you rode with Richie?”

“Eddie can’t ride with me,” Richie says immediately, because if he’s trapped in a small space with Eddie then he knows Eddie is going to use it as a chance to ask him questions he hasn’t thought of good answers to yet. “I’m riding with Mike.”

“I don’t have to ride with Richie to feel better, Richie’s not my _dad,_” says Eddie at the same time. They look at each other, and then away; Richie feels his cheeks heat up, which is horrifying. God, he’d really had no control at all over what his body said and did when he was this age. 

Mike claps Eddie’s shoulder gently. “The ferris wheel is really sturdy,” he assures him. “My grandpa does some of the installment and removal when it comes and goes. You’re safe, man.”

Eddie makes a vague huffing sound, a sure sign that he doesn’t believe Mike but is too polite to insult his grandfather. He’s not given the chance to come up with another argument, though, because open seats come down and slow for Bill and Bev to get on, and then Eddie and Ben are being ushered by a bored-looking teen in a fairgrounds vest into the next open space. 

Richie watches them get on, Ben too distracted by Eddie’s never-ending stream of nervous babble to see whether Bill and Bev are kissing. Richie can still hear Eddie rambling, even after he and Mike take their own seats two rows behind them. 

Once they’re far enough out of sight, Mike reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bag of M&Ms. He pours himself a handful and then offers the open back to Richie, who accepts.

“I wonder why I stayed,” Mike muses around a mouthful of chocolate. “I know you can’t tell me, it’s just ... I don’t even like it here. Why would I stay when all of you were gone?”

Richie empties a too-big handful of M&Ms into his mouth and uses the time he takes to chew them down into something manageable to think about it: the phone call, Old Mike meeting them at the restaurant, the nervous stiffness of his shoulders as they’d all sat down. Old Mike had been hot too, actually, now that Richie thinks about it. With a little space from how almost unrealistically hot Ben had gotten, it’s easier to see that all of them had aged pretty well other than Richie himself. Mike had been pretty jacked for a librarian. Richie bets all the townie teen girls had mysteriously gotten really into studying when he took over the front desk.

The honest answer is probably that Mike hadn’t ever felt like he’d belonged anywhere except with the Losers, and he’d stayed in Derry after they’d all left because it was the closest he could get. But Mike was smart, always maybe the smartest of them, if less of an outright nerd than Ben. Ben liked to know facts; Mike liked to think about things. Richie has this memory of Mike asking him once, years from now, whether Richie thought people could get paid for being philosophers. Richie had answered, _Only very, very boring people, Mike._

Richie knows telling Mike that moral philosophy was boring wasn’t the reason he’d stuck around in Derry, but he also knows there hadn’t ever been anybody who’d made him think that being smart in that way was worth anything. His grandfather hadn’t, and Richie certainly hadn’t, and maybe that was really it, in the end. Mike had felt like the only place he belonged was with the Losers, because the other places he felt like he belonged in weren’t worth being in.

“I can’t — I mean, you know it’s hard for me to say. To remember,” Richie says slowly. “But I think it was ... something to do with college. You didn’t go.”

He _had _gone, of course. You have to go, to be a librarian, even a librarian in a town the size of Derry. But he sure as shit hadn’t gone to become a philosopher. 

Mike blinks. “What?”

“Yeah, I know.” Richie shrugs, affecting a sheepish attitude. “Not much to go on, right? But it’s like — I think you didn’t, uh. I don’t know. Something about money.”

Mike sits back against the seat rest, looking a little gobsmacked as he stared blankly out at the fairground. “He didn’t fucking pay for my college,” he mutters. “I can’t fucking believe he doesn’t pay for my college, after all that talk about — twice as good for half as much. And he doesn’t even ... “

“Yeah it was like, too late to get funding or something,” says Richie, as casually as he can. “Hey, I wonder whether you could get, like, scholarships or some shit. I mean obviously I did not graduate college so I don’t know shit about the process, but I’ll bet there’s info floating around somewhere. About like. Merit grants.” 

Mike gives him a long look. “Why don’t you graduate college?” he asks.

“Uh, because I am a cool person,” Richie answers. “I went for a year and then dropped out because I wanted to do dope shit, not lame shit.” He winces, his own voice saying _very very boring people_ echoing in his brain. “I mean — uh. Not that school is lame. Some people like school, and that’s ... okay too.”

Mike snorts, bumping Richie’s shoulder with his own. “Okay, PBS. Thanks.”

The ferris wheel slows, and Richie looks out across Derry. He can see most of the town from here. He can see his house. He can see main street. He can pinpoint where the quarry is from the darkness of it. In New York and LA it wasn’t that dark anywhere, not even on the water. There were always boats and buoys and something happening, people carving space for themselves. 

Derry is pretty. It’s quaint. Richie looks at it and he can see himself running around, his terrible shirts and his too-big glasses, his friends, his mother forgetting where she was while she was just standing in the kitchen.

“I fucking hate this place,” Richie mutters, not really meaning to say it out loud.

Mike eats another handful of M&Ms. “Yeah,” he agrees. “But my grandfather says it’s always better to stick to the devil you know.” 

“No offense Mike, but your grandfather doesn’t know jack shit,” Richie tells him. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. The devil we know is like, an interdimensional space demon that wants to eat us.”

Mike turns to look at Richie in surprise, and then throws his head back. He laughs for a long time, hand clutching his shirt. The ferris wheel slowly starts to bring them back to the ground and Mike shakes his head, ruffling Richie’s hair like _Richie_ is the kid and Mike is the forty-year-old stuck in his child-body.

“That’s a good fucking point, Rich,” Mike says. “That’s a really fucking good point.”

The seven of them play a few arcade games and Richie wins an enormous stuffed giraffe that he makes Eddie carry around because the height differential is funny. Eddie insists that since he did all the labor of dragging it around he gets to keep it, and Richie lets him, in part because he has absolutely no use for a stuffed giraffe and in part because it’s even funnier to think of Eddie trying to bike home with that thing.

They eat cotton candy and then ride the Tilt-a-Whirl and nobody throws up except for Ben, who didn’t even eat any cotton candy. Bev makes Bill carry her piggy-back, and he pretends to protest for about three seconds before giving in. Richie had forgotten what flirting looked like at thirteen; it’s horrific. He’s extremely embarrassed for both of them.

Stan leans in and mutters, “If Big Bill doesn’t get his first kiss tonight then I don’t believe in love anymore.”

“If Big Bill doesn’t get his first kiss tonight then I don’t believe in hormones,” Richie answers. “Although, in hindsight, it’s fucking embarrassing that _Bill_ of all people gets his first kiss before I do.”

Stan and Mike laugh; Eddie says, “Nobody wants to kiss your trash mouth, Trashmouth,” and Richie makes a few obnoxious kissing noises at him before returning, “Nobody except your mom, Eds.”

“To be fair you handed him that one,” Stan tells Eddie as he sputters. “I mean. Silver platter.”

“Lots of people want to kiss me when I’m famous,” Richie informs them haughtily. They’ve all dropped back, giving Bill and Bev space, though poor Ben can’t even look at them. Richie feels a stab of pity for him and adds, “Lots of people want to kiss Benny-boy, too.”

Eddie shoves him with the giraffe. “Will you shut _up_ about how hot you think Ben is?” he snaps. “I’m starting to think you have a crush on him or something.”

Old Richie knows more about Young Richie than Young Richie does, and he knows it isn’t right to hijack his life, but the thought of denying it makes something turn in his stomach. So instead he just shrugs and says, “Old you had a crush on him too. You told me.”

“I did not!” Eddie cries, cheeks flaming. “That’s such a lie. Shut the fuck up. Whatever.”

“No, you definitely told me, I know the future,” Richie goes on. “It rains cotton candy and Madonna is the president.”

Ben laughs. “No way is Madonna still around,” he says. “She’d be, like, a thousand years old.”

“In the future everybody lives to be a thousand,” Richie tells him wisely. “It’s very normal.”

“I can’t believe that of all of us, _you’re_ the one who gets to know the future,” Stan grumbles. “Unbelievable.”

“I personally am glad that I don’t know the future,” Mike muses, kicking at the dirt. “I would hate to have to carry all that responsibility around.”

“Luckily, Richie is incapable of feeling responsible for anything, up to and including his own hygiene,” says Eddie, making a smarmy face in Richie’s direction. Richie makes one back and makes a threatening gesture toward taking his giraffe back. Eddie clutches it close protectively, half turning away in defense. 

An odd thing about time travel is that Richie remembers broad strokes, but has few specific memories. He remembers there being a fair but nothing specific about it, and now he wonders whether he’d won that giraffe the last time around. If he’d given it to Eddie. If Eddie had kept it, and for how long.

Had Eddie brought it with him when he left Derry? Did he have it in his apartment in New York and not remember why? When he’d forgotten Richie, had he remembered that a vague someone won it for him? 

Or had he just left it behind? It was just a stupid stuffed animal. Richie wouldn’t have brought it with him when he went off to New York, for the two semesters he tried to be a college student before realizing that it was stupid to pay thousands of dollars to fail all your classes and spend all your time at comedy open mics.

“I think It underestimated Richie,” Stan says loyally, and then holds up a hand to cut off anything Richie might say. “Don’t ruin it, keep your mouth shut,” he commands, and Richie obeys, clacking his teeth as he shuts his mouth.

At that moment, there’s a yell, and the sky lights up with fireworks. The losers turn their heads up to watch them, light spilling down onto their faces. A few feet ahead, Bill bends down and presses a nervous kiss to Beverly’s mouth. 

Richie watches the sky explode, and explode, and explode.

-

When Richie gets home, the house is dark except for a single light in the living room. His dad is sitting on the couch, head against the back cushions, eyes closed. He’s snoring a little, glasses slipping down off his face.

Richie stands in the doorway and watches him for a while. He’s — probably about Richie’s age, actually. Richie’s real age. There’s a book in his lap, his hand marking the page he stopped on. Richie remembers that his dad had never much liked reading; he was always more of a TV guy. When Richie was a kid — like really a kid, seven or eight maybe — they’d sit together in front of the TV on mute and they’d make up dialogue for the character. It was why Richie started doing the voices. He’d wanted to grow up and be the guy whose voices were in cartoons, grotesque and funny, making his dad laugh from miles away.

“Dad,” Richie murmurs, going over to the couch and gently shaking him away. “Dad, hey. Wake up. You gotta go to bed.”

His dad snuffles, startling himself awake. The book falls off his lap and his glasses tumble onto his chest. Richie picks them up, gently, and holds them out. “Rich,” his dad mutters, voice scratchy. “What time’sit?”

“I dunno, like ten or something,” Richie says. “My watch broke.”

“Ten’s kind of late for you to be out,” his dad points out, as if just noticing. “Isn’t it?”

Richie hesitates, then says, “Naw, it’s okay. We were just at the fair. Anyway, I was with the guys. Safety in numbers.”

“Hmmm,” agrees his dad, letting it go as he climbed slowly to his feet. “Well, head up to bed, okay, bud?”

“Okay,” says Richie, throat tightening. “Sure.”

He watches his dad amble up the stairs, not turning around to check if Richie is following him. He’s got his book in one hand and the other on the rail. Richie remembers that at some point in the next year, his mother is going to start waking up in the middle of the night and wandering off. His dad will wake up and she’ll be gone, and he’ll have to go out and find her. Sometimes she’d be in town, walking down the sidewalk barefoot in her pajamas; sometimes she’d be laying down in a field blinking up at the sky, frightened as a child because she didn’t know where she was or how she got there. 

Richie hadn’t ever thought to be grateful, before, that they’d put It down before all that. Who knows what might have happened to her in the early hours of morning, alone and disoriented. Who knows what holes she might have followed It down.

But she hasn’t started wandering yet. Richie knows because he remembers the first time: Christmas, 1989. Closing out the year on a real high note.

It’s possible, Richie realizes, that his dad was asleep on the couch because he was up, waiting. Because he wanted to make sure Richie got home safe.

It’s possible that his parents loved him, even when they forgot him. It’s possible Richie loved them even when he, too, forgot. It’s possible that you don’t stop loving people; you only tuck them away someplace safe, where it doesn’t hurt to look at them after they’re gone.

Richie trudges up the stairs and to his room, dumping out his pockets and flopping onto the bed. He blinks up at the ceiling until he feels himself start to drift off. He’s just sinking into a warm dream about doing stand up in a bouncy castle when he hears his window open and is jolted awake by Eddie banging his knee against Richie’s bedframe and swearing.

“What the fuck!” he snaps, sitting up too quickly and banging his forehead against Eddie’s. They both reel back, palms pressed to their head. “Goddamnit, Eddie!”

“Oh, what, you’re the only one allowe to sneak in?” Eddie snaps.

“Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted to talk! I saw you like half an hour ago!”

Eddie shifts, looking suddenly nervous. “I ...” He glances at Richie and then away, clearing his throat. “I wanted ... look, at the fair, you said that I — is it true? What you said. About Ben.”

Richie frowns. “Is it true that Ben got hot?” he asks, still rubbing his forehead. “Yeah, man, he was a fox. Why are you so obsessed with this? Because I feel like you’re really making a very big deal out of something that isn’t a very big deal.”

“No,” Eddie mutters. “Not that. I mean. Not really that. It’s — you said that I ... you said I told you that I had — that I was ... like ... ?”

“Ah,” says Richie.

“Shut up,” Eddie snaps, even though he literally just climbed into Richie’s room into order to hear him talk. “It was a lie, right?”

The terror in his voice is obvious. Eddie can’t imagine anything worse, Richie doesn’t think, than being what Richie is. 

_No fucking wonder I never said anything_, Richie thinks, feeling suddenly protective of himself, his younger self, who wanted so badly to be seen and was so terrified of it at the same time.

“Yeah, Eds,” he admits, trying to sound jocular and not ... God. So fucking sad. “I was just fucking with you. I told you, you married a woman. She was fucking horrible, but she had all the right parts, so. You don’t have to worry.”

He claps his shoulder in some approximation of reassurance, and then gently tries to push Eddie off the bed, but Eddie doesn’t budge. He chews his lip, a sure sign that he has more to say, and Richie debates forcing him out anyway, but this is Eddie, who is dead. Somewhere in the future, Richie’s version of Eddie is dead, and maybe he doesn’t have to be, if Richie can just figure out how to make him keep himself alive. So he doesn’t push him. He lets him sit on Richie’s bed being scared of Richie’s own feelings and waits.

“It’s just,” says Eddie, voice cracking, looking at Richie with a kind of desperation that Richie can’t quite place, “it’s just that I — that sometimes — ”

Richie’s stomach drops.

“Oh,” he manages after a moment. “... _Ohhhh._”

“Shut up,” Eddie cries immediately, even though Richie didn’t even say anything. He moves to stand, looking panicked, but Richie shoots out a hand and grabs his arm. He tries to wrench free. “Let me go. Nevermind. This is stupid. Just forget it.”

“Eddie,” says Richie, heart hammering, a roaring sound in his ears. “Eddie. Stop. Calm down.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” Eddie tells him, voice cracking and hitting a note that only dogs can hear. “I’ve never been more calm in my life! You’re the one that’s not calm! You calm down!”

Richie shifts, going up to his knees so that he can put both hands on Eddie’s shoulders. He meets Eddie’s gaze as calmly as he can and waits until Eddie’s breathing slows. He wants to say _me too, buddy._ He wants to say _I wish I’d known._ He wants to say _did we tell each other, last time? Did we tell each other and then forget?_

But he — but this isn’t his body. But he doesn’t think he gets to decide what Young Richie tells Eddie, or when. He doesn’t want Eddie to feel alone but what if this is only temporary, and when he fucks off back to the future Young Richie is left to deal with something he isn’t ready for?

“Am I happy?” Eddie asks, voice cracking again, but differently this time. “With — Myra? Am I happy with her?”

Richie wants to lie, but more than he wants Eddie to be reassured he wants him to live. He says, “No, Eds. I don’t think you’re happy. I don’t think any of us were happy.”

Eddie’s face crumples, but he stops struggling. He looks down at his hands. “Is it because of ... ?”

“I don’t know,” Richie answers, which isn’t a lie. He hadn’t asked Eddie about his marriage. He hadn’t wanted to know. He should have. A better friend would have. “Eds, I’m sorry. We didn’t really talk about it.” 

Eddie nods. The air seems to go out of him, and for a moment they both just sit there. 

Richie can’t give him what he wants to give him, but he can give him something else, so he says: “Eddie, there’s, uh. There’s this thing called bisexuality? In the future it’s very normal. Actually it’s, like, kind of cool and edgy? It’s having a real moment in popular culture, which I guess is kind of fucked up in its own way, but my point is that, like, it’s ... you can like both, if you want, and nobody gives a shit. I promise. I promise you that nobody gives a single shit.” 

“What if you ... like one more than the other?”

“I don’t think they make you divvy up percentages to get into the club,” Richie says neutrally. “Lots of people like both but prefer one or the other. Lots of people you know, actually.”

Eddie looks at him, and Richie meets his gaze. It’s not quite honesty but it’s not quite anything else, either. 

God, being thirteen sucked, clowns or no clowns.

“Do you have a crush on future Ben?” Eddie asks, voice hushed.

“Everybody has a crush on future Ben,” Richie answers automatically. “That’s not a qualifying question.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “You’re such a piece of shit,” he announces, and then bossily scoots up the bed and shoves Richie over. “Let me in.”

“You can’t sleep here,” Richie tells him. “C’mon, man, go home.”

“It’s going to rain. I’m not going to bike back soaking wet and then die of hypothermia,” Eddie says dismissively, burrowing under the covers. “Your parents don’t give a shit, they never give a shit. Your mom will definitely make me breakfast in the morning and mine’s not gonna be awake until noon because she took like four sleeping pills.”

Richie sighs, and pushes himself up onto his elbows. He has a throw blanket, but his floor doesn’t have a rug like Eddie’s does, and it’s uncomfortable. Still; Eddie is kind of right, about the rain, and Richie’s a dick but he’s not an asshole. Resigned, he grabs the throw from the foot of his bed and starts to climb off. Eddie reaches out and grabs his arm.

“Where are you going?”

Richie frowns, making a gesture at the floor to indicate what should be extremely obvious. “To sleep?”

“Why are you sleeping on the floor?”

“Because you’re thirteen and I’m forty?”

“You’re not forty. You’re thirteen.”

Richie pinches the bridge of his nose. “Eddie, we’ve been over this.”

There’s a stubborn set to Eddie’s jaw. He tugs hard enough on Richie’s arm that he tips forward, back onto the bed. “Richie,” he says, voice soft. “Can you just — _please_ can you just this one time listen?”

Richie pauses. Eddie isn’t quite meeting his eyes, face uncertain in the half light. Eddie, his arm broken, his grip tight. Eddie, who has just admitted to Richie at thirteen what Richie couldn’t admit to himself until two of his friends were dead. 

In an even small voice, Eddie asks, “Is it because of what I said?”

_Fuck_.

Richie climbs back into bed. “No, Eds,” he promises. “It’s because you’re a kid and I’m a grownup and it’s weird. That’s the only reason.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t tell,” Eddie tells him, grinning at little, and Richie groans.

“You’re going to be a fucking _nightmare_ twink in college,” he mutters, covering his eyes with the crook of his elbow. “Fine. Go to sleep. I’m staying here.”

“Pancakes in the morning?” Eddie asks. When Richie ignores him, trying to focus on his breathing and on remembering that he’s an adult, he prompts, “_Richie_.” 

“_Fine_,” Richie snaps. “Pancakes in the morning. Okay? Are you happy?”

“I’m happy,” Eddie says, and falls promptly asleep, his hand still on Richie’s arm.


	3. it seems my mind has been looped and then rewinded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Eds, you know — I’m not your Richie,” he blurts, half a reminder to Eddie and half to himself. “I don’t know where he went. I’m sorry.”
> 
> Eddie sits up, rubbing at his eyes. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he grumbles. “All Richies are my Richie, asshole. Fuck off.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...so i think this is going to be longer than the 4 chapters i had planned. i’m sorry that i lied, but what happened was that the Plot got away from me. currently aiming for 6!! if it grows beyond 6 i am going to feed myself to a clown.
> 
> **warnings for this chapter:**
> 
> \- casual/dismissive mention of relationship violence  
\- casual/dismissive mention of OCD  
\- lots of talk about dementia  
\- suicide mention  
\- reference to disordered eating

The thing about stories is that you have to tell them. If you don’t, they fade. Stories become memories and memories are vague, always; the ones you think are vivid aren’t — it’s only the stories you’ve made of them that have clear edges.

The other thing about stories is that the more you tell them, the truer they become. Richie built a career on saying things that weren’t true until they were. He talked about girlfriends until he got one, about not giving a shit about what people thought until he didn’t, about being famous until he was. Tell someone you’re famous and they will ask for your autograph. Tell people you don’t care what they think and they’ll stop telling you. Tell people you’re straight and a life built around your straightness will take shape.

If stories could become true the more he spoke them, did it matter that they had begun as stories? Is truth born out of lies any less true?

Richie wakes up and it is still 1989. It has been 1989 for three days. He keeps going to sleep and thinking maybe he will wake up back in his life, but he doesn’t. He’s still here. He feels forty and thirteen at the same time. He feels old and new. Tired and ready, tired the way you are only after losing something you hadn’t known it was possible to lose, ready the way you are ready only during that span of years where you don’t know what it is you think you’re ready for.

When Eddie blinks awake, he looks up at Richie and smiles and Richie’s thirteen-year-old body hurts with fondness. Richie tries to remember sitting in a Chinese restaurant across from a man who he had forgotten until the moment he’d seen him again, and finds that the face is blurry. Finds that he can’t recall any of their conversations.

Thirteen. Forty. Both. Neither?

“Eds, you know — I’m not your Richie,” he blurts, half a reminder to Eddie and half to himself. “I don’t know where he went. I’m sorry.”

Eddie sits up, rubbing at his eyes. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he grumbles. “All Richies are my Richie, asshole. Fuck off.” 

He climbs out of bed, punching Richie on the arm for no reason as he slides past, and abandons Richie in favor of going downstairs to bother Richie’s parents into making him pancakes. Richie sits on his bed in his pajamas.

_This isn’t my body_, he reminds himself. _This body is a ploy by an evil multidimensional bitchwizard. _

But looking down at his own hands, he thinks he might forget what Old Richie’s hands looked like. It _is_ his body, insofar as he is the one living in it, insofar as it was his body once and there isn’t anybody else in it now.

With a sense of absolute disconnect, Richie gets out of bed and follows Eddie downstairs. He watches him in the kitchen with Richie’s mom, talking easily to her. Richie hasn’t told him, or Stan, or anybody about what is happening to her brain. He doesn’t remember if he ever did. He doesn’t remember whether she lost him completely before or after he left Derry. He doesn’t remember where she will be buried.

Both Eddie and his mom turn to look at him, quizzical. “Pancakes for you too, Rich?” his mom asks. “Your man Kaspbrak has convinced me to put chocolate chips in them.”

Twenty-seven years from now Richie will sit in a Chinese restaurant with an Eddie who is not this Eddie, and Richie will love him as if he’d never stopped, but he cannot picture his face. He will love that Eddie and lose him and then come back here to love and lose this Eddie, too, all over again. 

Eddie grows up and marries a woman who hurts him the way his mother had, with love that disguised its poison with care. Richie grows up and doesn’t marry anyone at all. 

But _this_ could have been his life, he thinks. It’s almost unbearable to see it, to have it so close and know it isn’t what he gets in the end, that he doesn’t get anything in the end. If he’d been brave enough then — now, whenever. Whatever. If he’d been brave enough to love the cracked versions of people he had instead of running away in case a crack became a full break.

But you can’t really love something if you aren’t willing to love it broken, too.

“Chocolate chips would be great,” Richie says. He busses his mother on the cheek and thanks her before slumping down in the chair next to Eddie’s. He kicks his feet up on the table until his mother gives him a look and scolds, “I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that you’re allowed to put your feet where we eat.”

“You tried so hard to raise him right, Mrs. T,” Eddie commiserates with an exaggerated sigh. “I do the best I can to keep him in line but the kid’s an animal.”

“To mice, all cats look like lions,” Richie says loftily. “Mom, don’t listen to Eddie, his brain capacity is proportional to his height.”

“Hmmm,” his mother muses. “Is that how we talk to guests in our house, Richard?”

“Yeah, _Richard_,” says Eddie, before taking a big bite of the pancake stack that Richie’s mother has deposited in front of him. “I’m a _guest_.”

“A _pest_, more like,” Richie grumbles. “He’s taking you for a ride, mother, I’m telling you. He just gets away with it because he’s cuter than me.”

“I’m not cute,” Eddie protests at the same time as Richie’s mom stamps a kiss to the top of Richie’s head and says, “No one is cuter than you.”

Richie points a finger at Eddie before he can say anything. “Not a word, Kaspbrak,” he commands. “Not one peep from the prince of all mama’s boys.”

“A strong bond between a mother and son is healthy and has numerous psychological benefits,” Eddie sniffs. “Boys without mothers are shown to have lower capacity for empathy.”

Richie’s mother drops the plate she was carrying to the stove to collect Richie’s pancakes off the griddle. It shatters loud enough to make Eddie jump out of his seat, hands coming up into fighting stance as if It is going to jump out from around a corner. 

“Shit,” she hisses. The pancakes start to smoke a little as his mom hovers uncertainly, hands shaking. Richie pops up out of his chair and grabs the dishtowel hanging from the stove handle.

“It’s okay,” he soothes, nudging her toward the stove. “It’s fine, I’ll clean up the glass, you get the pancakes.”

She nods, hand pressed to her chest, and turns off the stove, moving the pan to the side. Richie is glad his father is at work; he always got worked up in a crisis.

Eddie is watching Richie curiously, but nevertheless gets up to retrieve a new plate for Richie’s mom. She takes it with a tight smile. 

“Oh, your _pancakes_, Rich,” she laments. Richie hears a wobble in her voice. “They’re a wreck. Shit. _Shit._”

Richie empties the dish towel full of glass into the bin and deposits it into the sink. “Naw, I like ‘em burnt,” he lies cheerfully. “I’m always asking Delores at the diner to burn them a little, aren’t I, Eds?”

“Always,” Eddie agrees loyally, a picture of innocence as he smiles at Richie’s mom even though Richie just made up a woman named Delores from a diner that doesn’t exist. “You’ve got a real weird kid, Mrs. T.”

She laughs, tension breaking, and the three of them return to the table. Richie and Eddie eat their pancakes, bickering good-naturedly, while Richie pretends not to notice his mom watching him. 

Richie used to think she watched him because she was puzzled by him, was already forgetting why he was there, maybe even wishing he wasn’t. But now, eating his burnt pancakes, he thinks — she was trying to memorize him. It and Richie were both wrong, in the end; it was never _Richie_ who got lost. Richie was always the one who stopped looking. 

Eddie goes home after breakfast, so he can sneak back into his house before his mother wakes. Richie’s mom waves him out and then turns back to Richie with a cocked head, looking puzzled.

“Did I forget that Eddie stayed over last night?” she asks, lowering herself carefully into the chair beside Richie. 

Richie’s throat aches from a memory of himself realizing he could tell her she had forgotten that she promised him things. A memory of himself saying _mom you told me I could have a new Gameboy. _She had bought him one. She kept her promises.

He is going to love her better, this time around. He’s going to love everybody better. He’s going to love them enough to make sure all of them get out, and stay out, and never see another clown again. 

“No,” he tells her. “No, he got into a fight with his mom yesterday and came here after you were asleep. He was really upset so I let him stay.”

She nods, relief passing quickly over her face before she settles into a warm smile. “Ah. Well. Okay. But you ought to have woken us to let us know.”

“I will next time,” Richie promises. “Hey, Mom?”

“Hm?”

“If you knew the future, but you couldn’t tell anybody. What would you do?”

“You mean would I try to change it?”

“Yeah.”

“Depends, I suppose. How bad is the future?”

Richie swallows. “Really bad,” he admits. “Fucking horrible.”

“Don’t say fuck,” scolds his mom, but distractedly. She studies her hands. “Rich, I know this is — a scary time. For all of us.”

“I don’t mean ... you,” Richie says quickly. “No, I’m not saying — it’s not about that.”

She gives him a long look, clearly disbelieving, and then lets it go with a sigh. “Okay. If I knew the future was bleak and couldn’t tell anybody, then I would ... live as best I could, and make sure everyone I loved felt loved by me.” When she turns her gaze to him again, it’s tender. “Do you feel loved, Rich?”

He closes his eyes. _No,_ he thinks. Or — maybe that’s not right. Maybe he hadn’t felt _unloved,_ he had only ever known how fragile love _was. _How quickly it could become meaningless, or turn sour, or fade away as people forgot you. As you forgot. 

But Eddie had been brave and now Richie will be, too, because he absolutely refuses to love and lose everyone he knows over and over again on the world’s shittiest ferris wheel.

“I feel loved,” he tells her, offering her his pajama sleeve as a tear slips down her cheek. He lets her pull him onto her lap and bury her face in his shoulder. “Do you feel loved?”

“Yes,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry. You’re — I shouldn’t put this on you.”

“Ask me again,” Richie says, swallowing down the lump in his throat. “Ask me as many times as you want. I’ll tell you. I’ll keep telling you even when you don’t ask.”

The thing about stories is that the more you tell them, the truer they become. He used to tell stories about being a playboy, about being rich, about being funny, and he did it so well that people believed him.

Richie doesn’t like that story anymore. He’s going to tell a different one, where he’s a good son, and a good friend, and nobody dies at the end. 

He is going to tell it again and again until everyone believes him. He is going to tell it until it becomes true.

-

The first thing Richie does is drag Bev to the arcade, because Stan refuses to go, Eddie sucks at all the good games, and Bill is too _good_ at all the good games. Bev has both a natural gift for murdering things in a digital setting _and_ an utter lack of patience for practice, so she’s the perfect level for Richie, whose hand-eye coordination is shit but devotion unparalleled. 

“I’m not really a gamer, Richie,” she reminds him, though she’d come because he’d asked and despite the hard time he’d given her initially, Richie thinks Bev might be one of his favorite people in the world. They’re going to be in a history class together next year, something Richie remembers but Bev doesn’t yet know, and he’s going to spend it laughing. When Bev’s aunt enrolls her in a ballroom class, Richie will be the only loser willing to practice with her. They’ll get pretty good.

But for now, she stands in front of Mortal Kombat and watches him with a raised eyebrow. “Yeah, I know,” he says. “But I don’t want to do any of the shit that like, girls do to bond.”

“I don’t know what girls do to bond,” Bev laughs. “Girls at school hate me. You losers are my only friends.”

“Hey, girls at school hate me too!” Richie points out cheerfully. “So we have that in common. See? We’re already bonding.”

She laughs again, nudging him with her hip as she turns to face the machine. “Okay. I’ll play this dumb game with you for an hour, and then you have to do something I want to do for an hour.”

“... What are you going to want to do?”

“Read Tiger Beat.”

“What the fuck is Tiger Beat?”

Bev waggles her eyebrows and smiles with an air of exaggerated mystery. “It’s that or no deal,” she tells him, holding out a hand for him to shake.

With a sigh, Richie accepts the hand and gives it a single, firm shake. “Fine, but if it’s not about fighting jungle animals I’m gonna be _so_ disappointed,” he informs her grouchily. 

“So you _have_ read it,” Bev jokes, and promptly pops a couple of coins into the machine. “Yeah it’s just like, hot tips on how to hunt big cats.”

Richie pauses in his character selection to stare at her. “Wait, really?” he asks.

“No, moron,” Bev says. She hits _accept_ for him, making him Reptile, which is absolutely not what Richie would have chosen, but there’s no time to argue with her about it because she launches into her first attack anyway. “I’m gonna kick your ass at this stupid game and then you and me are gonna read the New Kids On The Block interview and find out whether Tiffany’s family problems really are behind her.”

Reptile gets absolutely slammed by Sonya Blade. Bev makes a delighted sound and Richie is reminded that all of them were exposed _way_ too early to violence in a way that probably turned them all into the emotionally stunted adults they were in the old future. 

“BRUTALITY,” says the machine. “TEST YOUR MIGHT.”

“I got swindled,” he mutters. “I’m not letting you paint my nails.”

“Please. There aren’t any nails to _paint_,” Bev scoffs, making Richie suddenly self-conscious about his nibbled-down nail tips. “Anyway, don’t act like reading a magazine about hot celebrities is this insane girl thing when I know for a _fact_ you and Stan snuggle and read about how strong and smart and rich Goatman is.”

Richie blinks. “Wow. K-fucking-O, Marsh. But it’s Batman, and I think we both know that you know that.”

“Yeah, but Goatman is funnier.”

“What would Goatman even do?” Richie asks, managing to land a good enough hit on Sonya which only serves to irritate Bev into paying more attention to what she’s doing. “Ram people with his head?”

Bev laughs and leans into Richie as if he’s made her lose her balance, but Richie is himself a cheater, and he knows a distraction tactic when he sees it. He nudges her back with her hip and gives her a very dry look that elicits only a shameless shrug. “He’s very good at climbing,” Bev decides. “He’s an eco warrior. Save the grazing grass.”

“Goats graze?”

“Well they’re not fucking carnivores.”

“Goatman is. Goatman is a cannibal goat.”

“Wait, Goatman is an actual goat? Then why would he go by Goat_man_ instead of Goat .... goat?”

Richie lays his forehead down on the arcade button, accepting that Bev will use the opportunity to defeat him. “Goatgoat,” he repeats, laughing hard enough that he’s going to get a stomach ache. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Richie looks up to find Bev grinning down at him. “C’mon,” she says, “I’ve still got forty-five minutes of absolutely crushing your spirit. You’re gonna be _begging_ me to read to you about Tiffany’s family problems by the time we’re done.”

“FINISH HIM,” announce the game, and before Richie can get his hands back onto the controls, Beverly does.

-

It’s not actually that bad. Bev is good but she gets bored easily, so Richie gets soundly trounced twice and then makes a comeback to even them out at five victories apiece. After, Richie grudgingly allows Bev to drag him to the corner store to pick up a _Tiger Beat_ and they go to her aunt’s to read it. Richie doesn’t remember meeting her before; her face is unfamiliar when they tumble in together, still bickering over whether Richie’s final win counted, given that he’d tricked her into turning around by calling out Bill’s name. 

In Richie’s opinion, a win is a win, and if you don’t want to get beaten by tricks you should learn to be smarter. Bev is unsold on this, but only because none of _her_ cheating tactics worked.

“Hey Aunt Marisha,” Bev says cheerfully when they get inside. “This is my pal Richie. Richie, my Aunt Marisha.”

Aunt Marisha blinks up at them from the couch. She has her hair in rollers and nail separators between her toes. “Hi, Richie,” she greets, and pops a bubble of gum. “Babe, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve got too many boyfriends. I can’t keep ’em straight.”

Bev smiles, a little tightly. “Richie’s just a friend,” she says. “We’re gonna read magazines in my room. Do you want me to leave the door open?”

“Why would I want you to leave the door open?” Aunt Marisha asks, looking genuinely puzzled. “Look, I’ve got a date in an hour. Can you get dinner for yourself or do you need some cash?”

Bev turns so that her aunt can’t see her roll her eyes. “We’re good,” she says. “Thanks though. Have fun on your date.”

“If it goes well I might not be home til tomorrow.”

“Okay. I’ll put the trash out.”

“Fab. You’re the best. Nice to meet you, Richie.”

Bev flashes a thumbs up and drags Richie back to her room, which clearly is supposed to be an office but was being used as an extra closet. Bev’s put up some posters and has a little twin bed tucked in the corner. There are flowers on the windowsill. As she closes the door, Bev makes a face in Richie’s direction, shrugging sheepishly. 

“Aunt Marisha’s cool,” she says, heading off whatever judgment it is she thinks Richie is going to pass. “She’s — not really my aunt, you know. She was friends with my mom but we’d come here sometimes, when things got ... bad, at home. Anyway, after my dad died, there was this like, relative out in fucking Wisconsin or something, who said they’d take me? But — I’ve never even, like, met them, and I made this whole fuss with the social worker about disrupting my schooling. Aunt Marisha was really clear that she didn’t want, like, a kid, you know? But she said I could stay here until I graduate.” 

She won’t meet his eyes, busily straightening the already-straight books on her bookshelf. “It was really nice of her, to let me stay. She didn’t have to. And she’s nice, she’s — she treats me like an adult, you know? And — ”

“Bev,” Richie interrupts, reaching out impulsively to still her hand on the shelf. She risks a glance at him, then stares back at the book spines as if she’s determined to memorize them. “Uh. Look, I don’t really know ... how to talk to girls — ”

“You could try talking to me like I’m a person,” she says, dry as dust.

“Fair point well made, my good woman,” says Richie, affecting his British accent to make her laugh. It works, a little; she huffs quietly and her shoulders relax. “I just mean that, like. Everything’s all fucked up, you know? Who gives a shit if you live with some rando who clearly doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body?”

Bev sighs, turning at last to face him. “Just ... don’t tell Bill, okay?” she mutters. “He’d get all — Bill about it. He’d think it was bad.”

Richie opens his mouth automatically to defend Bill, but the truth is that Bev is right. He _would_ get all Bill about it. So instead he says, “You’re secret’s safe with me, Marsh.”

“Promise?” she asks, holding up a pinky. Richie takes it. The moment he does, Bev tightens her grip and spins her wrist so that she has him trapped, arm twisted painfully. “Tell me something, then. Mutually assured destruction.” 

The obvious answer is on the tip of his tongue — _I’m in love with Eddie_ — but he bites it back. It feels weirdly insignificant in the face of Beverly, orphaned and living in a converted office-closet. Instead, he gives her something of equal value: “My mom,” he says. “She’s dying.”

Bev lets him go instantly, jaw going slack. “Richie,” she gasps, voice tender. “Jesus. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean — ”

“It’s fine,” he assures her, shrugging. “I mean, I already watched her die once. Not like there’s gonna be surprises in the re-run.”

Bev blinks. “I forgot,” she tells him. “About your, like. Brain thing.” She waves a hand toward his forehead, as if to encompass the entirety of _you travelled back in time thanks to the mysterious workings of an evil magical clown that wants to eat us all._ Which: fair enough, Richie supposes. “That’s kind of worse.” 

“She has early-onset dementia,” Richie plows on. It’s easier to rip the Band-Aid off. “This is gonna be our last summer where she’s, like. Mostly still herself. It starts getting bad at Christmas and it never gets better. She dies in nineteen ninety-nine.”

“Richie,” Bev says again, before dragging him into a hug. He wraps his arms around her middle and buries his face in her neck. He didn’t tell her, last time around. He didn’t tell anybody. He pretended everything was fine, that his parents ignored him because they were grown ups and grown ups were useless. He spent most of his time out of the house, knowing he wouldn’t be missed, and then he went off to New York and never looked back. He doesn’t think he even told his dad that he was planning to go until he’d been accepted. He didn’t tell his mom at all. He didn’t even say goodbye; why would he? She barely knew who he was.

But he — doesn’t want to lie about it, this time. He doesn’t want to pretend his mom forgot him on purpose when he knows she tried her best not to.

“It’s not a good secret,” he mutters. “Because I think I want to tell everyone anyway. Eventually. At some point. But I — but not yet. It’s still good, you know? I don’t ... I want to pretend it’s going to stay good, for a little while.”

Bev nods, chin digging into his shoulder. “Yeah. I get it.” She pulls back and gives his hair a gentle yank. “Thanks for telling me, Trashmouth. Nobody’s ever told me a secret before. Like — I mean, as a friend. I know I’m like, _the girl_ — ”

“You’re a loser,” Richie interrupts. Bev was always so loud and brash; he hadn’t realized she’d felt ... other, even with them. “Sorry we don’t have more girls, it’s just that we’re all fucking unbearably horny monsters and most of them can’t stand us. You just have shitty taste.”

Bev lets go of him, laughing. “What about in the future? Do you get better?” 

Richie thinks about it as dispassionately as he can, then decides: “Yeah, but we just shift to being unbearable monsters in other ways. You too, though, to be fair. You suck as much as we do.”

“What!” Bev cries, appalled, but she’s grinning wide enough that Richie thinks she’s secretly thrilled to be part of the Shitty People Club. “I do not!”

“Yeah, you suck _huge_ donkey balls. You only fall in love with Ben once he gets ripped even though we all know that Ben is like, the nicest person alive. And you think you’re such hot shit just because you know Anna Wintour or whoever the fuck — ”

“Who’s Anna Wintour?”

“She gets big in the nineties,” Richie assures her. “My point is, we’re all garbage, and you’re garbage too.”

Bev blinks. “_Bill _doesn’t think I’m garbage,” she points out, cautiously. “Bill thinks I’m — like, this really cool and smart and special and pure person.”

“Listen, I love Big Bill,” Richie tells her, “but he’s a fucking moron. He thinks that just because he’s got his heart in the right place, he’s right about everything. Also, he’s got a savior complex the length of my wang, which nobody needs a psychology degree to know comes from the fact that he couldn’t save Georgie. Which, uh. Sorry. Is sad, obviously.” 

Bev cast him an extremely dry look. “Yeah, you sound really broken up.”

“Look, in my defense, Georgie died like, thirty years ago for me.” 

“Is that why you don’t want to save me? Because it was so long ago for you?”

“Bev,” Richie says, blunt and honest because he doesn’t really know how to be much else, “we just beat the devil’s own colon expulsion and lived to tell about it. I don’t know why _you_ think you need anyone to save you.”

She stares at him long enough that Richie starts to fidget, wondering if he’s said the wrong thing again, him and his stupid trash mouth, but just when he’s about to apologize, she blurts: “The bruises. That you said I had. I’m — in the future, I’m married to someone, right? Or I have a boyfriend?”

“Yeah. I don’t know his name.”

Bev nods, then flops back onto her twin bed and stares at the ceiling. Richie follows her down and lets her take his hand, still not looking at him. “It’s not Bill, is it?”

“No.”

“Then I guess we know where the bruises are from.” She shakes her head in disgust. “I can’t believe — after everything, I let myself ... God, that’s so fucking embarrassing.”

Richie gives her hand a squeeze. “If it makes you feel better,” he says, inhaling quickly, “I don’t date much at all until I’m almost forty and then I have a nervous breakdown and hallucinate that I travel back in time and get to relive my life as a better, more honest person.”

He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see her expression, but he doesn’t feel her move. Instead, she squeezes his hand back. Richie feels something rush over him, so strong and so soft that he might cry about it if he thinks too much, so he tries not to. He thinks about Goatgoat instead.

After a few moments, Bev clears her throat and asks: “So — Ben, huh? That’s kind of ... I mean, Ben and me?”

Richie doesn’t open his eyes. He lets himself drift a little, feeling only the snugness of Bev’s comforter and the warmth of her hand in his. “Yeah,” he says. “He gets hot but he never gets, like, _un-Ben_, you know what I’m saying? He shows up looking like a Brazilian soccer player but the second he opens his mouth you’re just like, oh my God, this dumb fuck totally babysits for free.”

Bev laughs for a long few moments, and Richie opens his eyes, rolling his head to grin at her. “Thanks, Goatgoat,” she tells him, rolling forward slightly to kiss his cheek. “Can we read Tiger Beat now?”

“Yeah, but I’m gonna do it in one of the voices,” Richie warns her. “Tiffany’s gonna be a fucking Hispanic farmer and you can’t stop me.”

Bev groans, but hands over the magazine obediently. She curls up next to Richie, nuzzling into his shoulder and not letting go of his hand.

-

They meet up with Stan, Ben, and Eddie at the movie theater after Bev’s Aunt Marisha leaves for her date. Bill’s parents are having some kind of fancy party he’s not allowed to miss, and Mike’s grandfather tends not to let him go to the movies unsupervised at night. He promises to try to sneak out to meet them after.

They’re seeing _Weekend at Bernie’s_ but buy tickets for _Kiki’s Delivery Service_. It’s been years since Richie has seen _Weekend at Bernie’s_, but he remembers it being funny. Or — actually, he remembers the _sequel_ being funny, and kind of lowkey about how the two main guys were in love with each other. Richie is fuzzy on the plot but he remembers something about one of them saving his virginity for the other, kind of. Or something.

“Too bad I can’t save my virginity for the sake of any of _our_ friendships,” he laments while they wait in line for popcorn. “On account of how I’m famous and am practically _drowning_ in people who want to have sex with me.”

“Yeah but not yet, bitch,” Eddie reminds him.

“Hey, you don’t know that th—”

“Nobody believes that you’ve had sex already,” Stan interrupts. “Don’t even try it.”

Richie tries honestly to remember how old he was for his first time. It was with a girl named Sarah, during his year of college, he thinks. She was from Boston. She was petite, with a strong jaw, and talked a mile a minute.

So Richie ... had a type, clearly.

“Big words from Mr. Prepubescent over here,” Richie taunts, before handing over enough money to get popcorn and twizzlers for himself and M&Ms for Eddie. “You want a soda?”

“Fucking obviously I want a soda.”

“Two Cokes, please.”

The teen behind the counter snorts as she goes to fill up their cups, muttering something Richie doesn’t quite catch. Eddie shifts a little closer to him, peering hungrily at his popcorn. “You’re gonna share, right,” he says. “Get extra butter on that.”

Richie clutches the popcorn to his chest. “Get your own!” he cries as the teen delivers their Cokes and makes his change from the register.

“Aw, c’mon, I don’t want a whole one,” Eddie whines, trailing Richie to the theater. “Give me some of yours.”

“Give him some of yours, Richie,” Bev calls from behind them. “He’s a growing boy.”

Richie turns to walk backwards as he shakes his popcorn threateningly in Bev’s direction. “Don’t _make_ me call Goatgoat, Marsh,” he says, and Bev throws her head back as she laughs, a loud cackle that startles Ben enough that he nearly drops his chocolate. Stan looks between Richie and Bev like he’s puzzling something out, then visibly decides not to care. 

When Richie turns back around, Eddie is glaring at him. “What the fuck is a Goatgoat?” he asks.

“The best superhero of all time,” says Richie, at the same time that Bev dissembles, “It’s kind of a long story.”

Eddie’s glare doesn’t lessen but he drops the subject. They take seats in the back row, the theater mostly empty since no one else knows yet that the murders will stop. Ben sits on the end, next to Bev, then Stan, Richie and Eddie. Eddie leans into Richie’s side and insists on eating his popcorn. Stan keeps his snacks protected carefully in his lap and ruthlessly slaps Richie’s hand away when he tries to take a Twizzler.

“_Stan_ley,” Richie gasps, appalled. “I went to your Bar M_itz_vah.”

“Are you going to bring that up forever,” Stan says dully, resigned.

“Nobody else went!”

“Oh,” says Ben, “should we have gone? Stan, did you want us to go?”

Stan hunches his shoulders, slouching in his seat. “No,” he mutters. “It’s fine. I just don’t want Richie’s gross hands in my popcorn. I know you don’t wash your hands after you pee.”

“I do too,” Richie protests. “Like, _most _of the time.”

Stan makes a grossed-out face and clutches his popcorn closer. “You’re disgusting,” he announces. “I’m never touching you again.”

“Easy, Captain OCD,” jokes Richie, and everyone — just blinks at him.

“Oh seedy?” Eddie repeats. “What the fuck is a seedy?”

Richie frowns. “No, like — OCD. Like that thing where people wash their hands a lot?”

“Washing your hands after you’ve used the restroom isn’t _a lot_,” Stan retorts. “It’s the bare minimum recommended by doctors.”

It occurs to Richie that he has no idea when OCD became, like, _a thing_. Obviously people will have had it forever, but the eighties was a time when all that stuff started to get big — OCD, ADHD, that thing that used to happen to his agent where every time the sun went away for a few days in December she couldn’t get off her couch. Like, Richie had a whole joke in his special about how he definitely had ADHD that went undiagnosed and now he was too easily distracted to remember to go to the doctor. “I can’t believe I’m literally the most scientifically well-educated person here,” Richie marvels. “I could be the world’s most groundbreaking doctor if only I’d paid even like one second of attention during a single Ted Talk.”

“Who’s Ted? Like your roommate or something?” asks Eddie, looking more and more irritated. “Is Ted the one who’s seedy?”

Richie sighs. “Let’s — just watch the movie,” he suggests. “I don’t feel like explaining advances in psychological science to you dickbags.”

The lights go down, and Richie settles in. Stan pulls a Twizzler out of the bag and hands it to him wordlessly, not turning his head, because Stan is and always will be the best. On his other side, Eddie digs an elbow into his side and tugs the popcorn bag so that it’s more evenly between them, settling against him so that their shoulders are touching. 

Richie lets Eddie boss him into a position that’s more comfortable and then pays half attention to _Weekend at Bernie’s_ and half to the boy next to him. Now that he’s thought about it, it _does_ make sense — Stan’s whole thing about the shower caps, how he always wiped down bus seats before he sat on them, his distaste for touching old books. He was never a hypochondriac like Eddie, but he _did_ sometimes wait for Richie in the bathroom so that Richie would be the one who touched the door handle. 

Maybe — had grown-up Stan ever looked into it? Had he ever told anyone? He was so convinced that if he did the right things, in the right order, at the right time, he could hold things together. Only that wasn’t how anything worked. You could do all the right things forever and still end up climbing into a bathtub with a razor in your hand, if you got the equation wrong. If you didn’t understand what the input for _the right thing_ actually was, all your outputs would be fucked up. 

Shit. Richie wishes he’d paid closer attention to — whatever, the world. He really should have watched more Ted Talks. 

“Stop staring at me,” Stan hisses out of the side of his mouth. “I already gave you a Twizzler.”

Richie would pay one million dollars for Google to have already been invented. When did the Derry library get computers?

Shit, is Richie going to go to the _library_? On _purpose_? During the _summer_? 

How the fuck do you find books in a library?

“Ben,” he hisses, leaning forward. Ben bends so he can see around Bev, raising his eyebrows. “Can we hang out tomorrow? Just the two of us?”

“_Wow_, okay,” snaps Eddie. “Cool, asshole. I see your crush on Ben is already in the works.”

“Just getting in on the ground floor, before he gets too hot and has to dodge all the babes throwing themselves at him.”

“_Pleas_e can we watch the movie,” says Stan, sounding pained.

Ben shoots him a thumbs up. “Sure, Richie,” he whispers. He looks pleased as he disappears behind Bev, leaning back against his seat. Eddie digs his elbow into Richie’s side again, clearly annoyed at being left out, and grabs a furious handful of Richie’s popcorn to punish him, chewing it loudly in Richie’s ear. Richie just gives him a smarmy smile and lets him get away with it, looping his arm around Eddie’s neck and dragging him in against his chest to give him a noogie. 

“Watch the _movie_, Eds,” he taunts.

“Don’t call me Eds,” protests Eddie, and then, after a moment of thought: “And fuck off.”

Richie loosens his grip, but Eddie doesn’t pull away. He stays where he is, one hand in Richie’s popcorn, eating smugly. Richie looks down at the top of his head and thinks, _oh boy._

-

“You want ... to go to the library?” Ben repeats, staring uncomprehendingly at him. “_You_ do?” He looks between Richie and the library doors like he thinks he might be hallucinating. “You, Richie Tozier?”

Richie rolls his eyes and adjusts his backpack strap on his arm. “Look, I have _interests_,” he sniffs. “I’ve got _curiosity_.”

“I thought your curiosity could mostly be satisfied by nudie magazines,” Ben tells him. Richie mimes being shot, falling to his knees dramatically and clutching his chest.

“A direct hit! Officer, a direct hit!” As Ben laughs, Richie gets back to his feet. “Anyway, don’t call them _nudie magazines_, Benjamin, that’s so eighties. Just say porn.”

“It _is_ the eighties,” Ben reminds him.

Richie waves a dismissive hand. “Yeah, but barely. We’re about to be the nineties, and people _love_ the nineties. No one shuts up about the nineties after they’re over.” Ben’s stomach rumbles, and Richie frowns. “Oh, are you hungry? Did you eat breakfast?” Richie’s parents hadn’t been home when he’d woken up, so he’d had the Tozier Special: dry cereal because they were out of milk and no one remembered to buy it.

“Yeah,” Ben mutters, cheeks blooming pink. He doesn’t quite meet Richie’s eyes. “Probably just indigestion.”

Richie puts a hand on his own belly. Actually, now that he’s mentioned it ... “I could have a snack,” he decides. “You know. Brain fuel. Let’s get a second breakfast before we dig in.”

“I don’t have any cash,” Ben says quickly. “Let’s just — ”

“I’ll spot ya, sonny boy,” Richie says in his best 1920s gangster accent. “C’mon, waffles on me. My parents have been feeling guilty about my life lately so they’ve been _showering_ me with allowance money. I’m flush, bitch!”

Ben scrubs at his forehead. He looks genuinely torn, which is confusing, because Ben loves to eat. Like damn, what kind of breakfast is _his_ mother making? Richie’s gotta sleep over at Ben’s more often.

“Fine,” Ben agrees, sighing. “Let’s get breakfast.”

They go to IHOP, because Richie fucking loves IHOP. Everything tastes exactly the same and they practically pay you to eat there; what more could you want? The first time Richie went on tour he spent so many hours eating at roadside IHOPs with various truckers and families on road trips. Sometimes he agent ate with him, when his agent was along, but usually it was just Richie, sitting in a booth and watching other people. Nobody knew who Richie was, nobody expected anything of him, he could just sit and chill and not be anyone at all for a little while.

He’d fucking hated touring, actually, but. The IHOPs were good. 

Richie orders a huge waffle, with whipped cream and strawberries; Ben gets ... 

“An _omelette_?” Richie echoes blankly, after the waiter has gone. “You come to the International House of Pancakes and you get an _omelette_?”

“It’s only two ninety-nine,” Ben defends himself. “It looks good.”

“It’s got _vegetables_ in it,” Richie says, horrified. “There’s _broccoli_ in your _breakfast._”

Ben heaves a sigh. He says patiently, “I already _had_ breakfast. This is like. Lunch, kind of.” 

“Benjamin, it’s 10am, you can’t call anything lunch until at _least_ noon.”

“Well since I’m eating now, maybe I won’t be hungry at noon.”

“Of course you’ll be hungry at noon. Everyone gets hungry at noon. It’s a biological imperative.”

“Well, if I’m hungry, I’ll eat,” Ben snaps, in a tone that Richie has never heard from him before. In fact, he doesn’t think he’s ever heard Ben truly _snap_ at anybody. “Will you leave it alone?”

He holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender, taking a big gulp of his soda, but watches Ben over the lip of his glass. He’s tapping anxiously on the table, not looking at Richie, watching other people eat. He’d ordered a Diet Coke. _It’s not like I’m not trying_, Ben’s voice grumbles in his head. _Nothing works._

Richie looks down at his waffle when it arrives. It’s enormous, topped with so much whipped cream he could — and might — make a beard out of it. Richie’s gonna be able to eat this whole thing and still be hungry at lunch and tomorrow he’s going to look exactly the same; at this age he’d been a black hole of junk food and soda and it hadn’t ever been a problem. It wasn’t until he was in his late twenties that it started to catch up with him, that he had to start doing things like go to the gym and look at a restaurant menu before he agreed to go.

_You can lie_, his brain reminds him. 

But what if Ben not losing all that weight means that Bev doesn’t fall in love with him? What’s the balance? What does Richie owe them both?

“Uh,” he says, clearing his throat and not sure what he’s going to say until he’s saying it: “I, uh. I forgot to tell you something last time, about how hot you get.”

Ben raises his eyebrows, toying with a napkin. “Is it that I have facial hair? Because my mom says all the men in my family were late bloomers.”

“What? No,” Richie laughs. “Although — wait, _did_ you have facial hair? I can’t believe I don’t remember. I did nothing but stare at you.” 

“I’ve always kind of wanted a goatee,” Ben muses. “I think I’d look nice.”

“Don’t grow a fucking _goatee_, you’re not a _pirate_.”

“I could be a pirate! Maybe that’s how I get hot.”

“Ben, being a pirate requires regularly breaking the law, and you won’t even ask permission to use the bathroom during class because you think it’s disrespectful.”

Ben laughs quietly, looking down at his lap with a bloom of pink on his cheeks. He’s so cute, Richie thinks. How did no one realize how cute he was? How had Richie missed it, the first time around? 

“The thing about you being hot,” he says. “It’s — I said you were hot, not skinny.”

_Fuck it_, he thinks. Bev can fall in love with Ben as he is or they can both be happy on their own. Richie’s not a fucking matchmaking service. 

Ben’s head jerks up. “What?” 

“Yeah, man. Sorry, I should have clarified before. In the future being big is _super_ in.”

“You said I had abs,” Ben points out suspiciously. “You can’t be fat and have abs.”

“Well, you clearly work out,” Richie dismisses, because he has no idea whether you can be fat and have abs. “I just mean that you’re, like. You don’t have to be worried about losing weight, is all. In the future you aren’t skinny but you’re like, the hottest person in any room you go into. Because of your _self-confidence._”

Ben looks extremely dubious about the notion of having self-confidence, which is fair, in Richie’s opinion. “My what.”

“I know it’s hard to imagine,” Richie admits. “But yeah, man. You just walked in with this air of like, _I’m sexy and I know it_. And we were all like, shit! He’s right.” 

_Sayonara, Hot Ben,_ Richie thinks, and offers Ben a bite of his waffle.

Ben grins at him and takes it.


	4. it happens all the time, and i keep running back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie starts to think that maybe he could do this, maybe he could just live a life, a better one than he had the first time. He starts to think that maybe, for some reason, perhaps by accident, It has given him a second chance.
> 
> And then he wakes up to all six-foot-one of his adult body dragging him out of bed with absolutely insane eyes, shouting, “WHAT IN THE SWEET FUCK DID YOU DO TO OUR LIFE?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SURPRISE! PLOT HAS ARRIVED! and only a three day wait! that's because i'm very ready to be finished writing this fic but am also very determined TO finish writing this fic, so. let desperation be a motivator.

Richie — settles in. He’s always been adaptable, and after two weeks in his bony thirteen-year-old body he starts to remember where it is in space and stops walking into things. It isn’t that he forgets _that_ he’s an adult, but he forgets part of what being an adult _was_ — that is, he just feels like who he is, thirteen and forty all at once. Sometimes more one than the other. Usually something in between.

He spends more time with his parents than he had the first time around, goes with his mom to doctor’s appointments and helps his dad organize the garage. He finagles a sleepover at Ben’s to horn in on his mom’s breakfasts, but it turns out she has him on a no-carb diet so all they eat is fruit, which is ... a fucking war crime, in Richie’s opinion. They go up to Ben’s room after and Richie breaks out the box of Pop Tarts he’s taken to carrying around, because he’d forgotten that at this age he was starving to death _all the time._

He goes to Bev’s when his house is empty and he doesn’t want to explain to Stan or Eddie or Bill why his parents are spending the weekend down in New York, and her not-Aunt Marisha truly doesn’t care about anything so Richie sleeps on the floor for a couple days until they get back. On Sunday, all seven of them bring a picnic out to the quarry and lay in the sunshine, eating candy and peanut butter sandwiches that Mike made, the only one of them to bring actual food.

Richie starts to think that maybe he could _do_ this, maybe he could just live a life, a better one than he had the first time. He starts to think that maybe, for some reason, perhaps by accident, It has given him a second chance.

And then he wakes up to all six-foot-one of his adult body dragging him out of bed with absolutely _insane_ eyes, shouting, “WHAT IN THE _SWEET FUCK_ DID YOU DO TO OUR LIFE?”

-

_two and a half weeks earlier or twenty-seven years later,  
depending on how you look at it_

Nobody dies at the end. 

Well — except Georgie, Richie supposes. Sweet Georgie, who always seemed so small, and who looked at Bill the way they all looked at Bill, as if he was president of the world. Richie had liked him, for a kid. Most little siblings Richie knew were annoying, but Georgie was quiet and sweet and mostly just wanted to be in the same room as them when they were all over.

But none of _them_ died, and Richie hadn’t realized he was kind of expecting one or two of them to until they were standing in a field slicing their hands open and promising to come back when It does. He hadn’t realized he was half expecting it to be him until he went home and his mother freaked out about the cut on his hand and sat him down at the kitchen table, bandaging it as if he was hemorrhaging blood, and he realized that he was alive and going to stay alive. _Rich you’ve got to be more careful now_, she’d told him, squeezing his wrist, _because it’s going to be a busy summer and I — and your dad and me are going to be away a lot. _

She’s sick, is the thing, and Richie knows she’s sick, but no one is exactly telling him, which means it’s bad. Really bad. Two days ago, distracted, Richie’s dad forgot his fucking name when he was trying to ask him to pass the salt. _Uh, uh, uh ... son, will you pass the —_

But Richie thinks: _I can survive anything._ Clowns, psychopaths, his parents, and even the inevitability of Eddie Kaspbrak refusing to love him; Richie is going to survive it. He’s going to get the fuck out of Derry and never, ever look back.

But for now he makes sure the spine of his _E_ is straight. Eddie has always been such a stickler for handwriting, because Eddie is a pretentious shit. He’s small and he’s a little asshole and Richie likes him _so much_, it’s honestly embarrassing, even apart from the, like ... whatever. The gay thing. 

Richie doesn’t think he’s _gay_, per se. He’s like — he doesn’t know if there’s a word for it. He likes the nudie magazines he has hidden in his decoy box. It’s just ... he likes the other ones, too. He, uh. He likes them a lot.

Not that it matters. He’ll grow out of it, probably. He’ll fuck off to New York and be absolutely _drowning_ in babes because everyone knows girls can’t resist a British accent, which he’s getting good at. 

Well, better at. 

Richie lays back on the bridge and looks up at the cloudless sky. There’s no point in telling anybody or making it a whole other thing about current Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier that is weird and different and unlikable when one day he’s going to be somebody completely different. Somebody that has nothing to do with Derry, or oversized Hawaiian shirts, or sitting alone on a bridge that is literally named for an activity that requires at least two people.

As he starts to drift off, he thinks: _I’m going to be somebody worth remembering._

-

And then Richie Tozier wakes up.

-

“You were screaming,” says a voice he doesn’t recognize, which is attached to a body that he also doesn’t recognize. “What the fuck, man.”

Richie is tempted to continue screaming, but he doesn’t know where the fuck he is or who the fuck this guy is supposed to be, and he’s in a house he doesn’t know, and he was pretty sure all of this was supposed to stop after they killed that _fucking clown._ “God fucking _damnit_,” he hisses, and the guy backs off.

“Uh, okay,” he says. “Well. See you in the morning, I guess.”

He backs out of the room, and the moment he is alone Richie starts rifling through his desk. He finds a passport. It has a photo of a billion-year-old man, who’s kind of dishevelled and looks like he smokes weed and jerks off in movie theaters. The name on the passport is _Richard Tozier_.

Richie finds the bathroom. He looks in the mirror. 

“I think I fucking — time traveled,” he says to his own entirely grown up reflection, and promptly throws up.

-

Richie finds Stan. He has to wait until the morning, when he makes that guy — who turns out to be his roommate (?) and is named Theodore (??) teach him how to Google (?????). At first he just asks innocuous questions like, “Hey, what state are we in?” and “Do you know my friend Stan?” but when that seems to freak him out he blurts, “What would you say if I told you I time traveled?”

“Ohhhhh,” says Theodore. “Are you doing, like. A method thing? For a part?”

“A part?” Richie echoes.

“Your agent must have gotten you an audition for something. Comedians are super in right now.”

“Yes,” says Richie, not understanding most of what is being said to him. “Everything you just said.”

Theodore nods sagely. “Fun. Well, I’ve got a screenwriting class at eleven but sure, I can play along to help you develop your art. Let’s Google your friend Stan and see if we can find him.”

Stan, it turns out, is living in Atlanta and is married to a woman named Patricia. He’s an accountant. His hair is really terrible, like even worse than it was when they were kids, and he apparently doesn’t wear a yarmulke anymore. Richie wonders what his dad thinks about that.

Anyway, he doesn’t get to ask, because when Stan picks up the phone, Richie immediately blurts out the whole long story, and instead of Stan saying, _okay Rich calm down let’s think this through logically_ like the big dumb nerd he is, there’s a long silence until Stan says, “... I’m sorry, who did you say this was?”

“It’s _me_, Stanley!” Richie cries. “Richie Tozier! Trashmouth!”

“Trash ... mouth,” Stan repeats. 

“From Derry!”

“Derry in Maine?”

“What other fucking Derry — ”

“I’m really sorry, I’m just drawing such a blank,” says Stan, and Richie is so appalled that he shouts into the phone, “I WENT TO YOUR BAR _MITZVAH_.”

“Wait, did you say Richie Tozier? Like the comedian?”

Richie bangs his head three times successively on the table. “I’m hanging up,” he announces. “Fuck you big time, pal.” He ends the call — telephones are fucking _wild_ in the future, Richie has one that’s _all his_ and it opens with his _fingerprint_ — and scrolls through, looking for other names he recognizes. There’s no Bill, no Bev, no Mike or Ben or ... Eddie. Nobody, not even Richie’s fucking _parents. _His only speed dial numbers are called _Mr Agent Man_ and  👻📝 and the string of written messages are from them, from his phone company, and from a string of unsaved numbers that are apparently women from bars.

That bit is cool, at least. Richie always knew he’d grow up to be sexual dynamite.

Richie debates tracking down the other losers, but he feels a little — delicate, honestly, after hearing Stan’s grown-up voice not remember him. What had happened between them? Between all of them? What on earth was big enough that it could make him splinter off and give them the space to forget him? _Had_ Stan forgotten, or had Richie been purposely erased, and all the other losers were currently hanging out in Atlanta laughing about the way Stan said _sorry I’m just drawing a blank_?

No, Richie thinks. No — maybe something bad happened, something really bad, but there’s no way Mike “Dad” Hanlon was going to laugh about making anyone feel bad. There’s no way Bill would let them. Maybe Eddie would, just to be a shithead, but there’s no way _Stan_ — 

Richie’s phone rings. _Mr Agent Man._

He picks up, cautiously. “Uh. Hello?”

“Richhhhh,” says a voice that Richie instantly hates. “Glad you’re up, bud. Listen, for the gig tonight, the venue’s changed because they overbooked tickets so I’m just going to send a car, all right? But it’s okay, they’re giving you a few extra minutes to make up for it. Can you do a full thirty?”

None of any of these words make sense, but Richie says, “Yeah, whatever,” because he’s not an idiot.

“Great. Knew I could count on you. You get those new jokes from Rod?”

“Yes,” says Richie, who doesn’t have any idea who Rod is or where he’d receive these jokes from. 

“Amazing! Fabulous! See you tonight. Be ready by seven.”

Mr Agent Man hangs up the phone. Richie stares down at it. _Richie Tozier, the comedian? _asks Stan in his head.

_Holy shit_, Richie thinks. He takes stock suddenly of his apartment: nice furniture, a big fridge, fluffy throw pillows, crown moldings. Outside of the window he can see a city sprawling outward, big and bright and warm-looking. Richie goes into his room and digs through a pair of discarded jeans on his floor to find his wallet, and sure enough, there it is, on his driver’s license: Richie lives in Los Angeles.

Holy shit, Richie is a comedian who lives in a sick apartment in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the United States. Random girls give Richie their number in bars and he doesn’t text them back. Richie is _famous._

Richie is _straight_, he realizes suddenly. Unless ... unless Theodore is ... his secret boyfriend? Nobody had tried to kiss anybody else. They didn’t sleep in the same room. Theodore hadn’t seemed any more touchy-feely than anyone else in Richie’s life had ever been, but this is the future. Maybe it’s cool in the future not to acknowledge that you’re having sex? 

Maybe Richie is, like, an asshole about it? Maybe he makes them pretend to be — 

“Roommates makes more sense,” he tells himself out loud, against the sick feeling in the stomach. “Just normal roommates. Maybe we met in college. Maybe we’re best friends. Maybe I replaced Stan.”

_You can’t replace _**_Stan_**_, _his brain mutters traitorously, but whatever, fuck Richie’s brain, it’s never done him any good anyway. Stan clearly replaced Richie with this fucking _Patricia_ woman, so. He can go blow his dad for all Richie cares. Richie’s life is clearly bitchin as fuck. Who needs a bunch of losers when Richie obviously has a ton of money and gets a _ton _of ass, so, whatever, Stan. 

Whatever.

-

Richie looks Eddie up. He catches on to computers pretty quickly. The small computer sitting on his desk requires a password, but luckily Richie is apparently not _that_ different as an adult, because his password is _yourmom76, _which Richie guesses on the first try. 

Eddie is married. To a woman. A woman who looks _startlingly_ like Eddie’s mom. It’s not impossible based on the photo from a website called Facebook that Eddie did, in fact, marry his actual mother, except that her name seems to by Myra, which is a dumb fucking name, in Richie’s opinion. 

None of this makes any sense. After everything they went through, after the placebos and the hideout and — and everything, how the fuck could Eddie just go and marry his mom? Fine, maybe he married a woman, it’s not like Richie didn’t know he was ... like Richie didn’t know that Eddie was never going to marry — whatever. But his _mom_? Basically his real literal mom except slightly more age-appropriate?

Maybe Richie had sold sex with Eddie’s mom, like, too well. Maybe he’d accidentally convinced Eddie that his mom was a sexual dynamo and he married Mom 2.0 in an attempt to catch some of that spice. 

Gross. Super gross.

Richie closes out the page. He doesn’t try to reach out to Eddie because Stan not remembering him was quite enough for one day, thanks-no-thanks. Clearly Eddie and Richie aren’t close anymore, if the fact that he doesn’t have his phone number is any indication, so why should Richie bother? Why should Richie stick his fucking neck out?

Instead, Richie takes a deep breath and types in _Margaret Tozier Derry Maine. _He squeezes his eyes shut as he hits _enter_ and then sits there, not looking, for a long few seconds. His heart hammers against his ribcage. 

The thing is, there are two reasons for not having your parents’ phone number, right? Just two: you don’t want it because you don’t talk, or you don’t need it because they’re dead.

He peels one eye open, then the other. On the list of search results, the first says _Margaret Lorraine Tozier, 53, died in her sleep November 1st in the Lennox Care Home in Bangor, Maine. She was the wife of Wentworth Tozier, who practices dentistry, and mother of Richard Tozier, a comedian. Margaret suffered from vascular demen —_ Richie shuts the laptop.

No. Fuck this. Fuck this. He’s going to take a shower and he’s going to order a pizza and at seven he’s going to go be an amazing comedian and fuck everything else.

-

“You guys ever time traveled?”

The audience chuckles. Backstage, Mr Agent Man — whose name Richie has still not deciphered so he’s just been calling him Mr Agent Man relentlessly, as if it’s a joke — looks down at his phone and then up at Richie again, confused. He holds the screen up and mouths, _Read the jokes._

Richie ignores him.

“I was thinking this morning about like, what if I time traveled, what would me as a kid think about me now? Because I’m gonna be honest, I never thought my life would be this great. I’m rich as _fuck_, you guys. Like, I am _surprised_ I don’t have a Jeeves running around somewhere being like, ‘Master Tozier, your evening whisky and your silkiest robe.’” He does the British voice for Jeeves and the crowd laughs again, a little longer this time. Richie feels himself relax. He’s gotten pretty good at the voice, actually. 

Thanks, Old Richie. 

“Like, I have all these texts on my phone, from women. Women! Who want to have sex with me! _Me_!” He gestures inarticulately at himself, as if in great surprise. Laughter. “Listen dickbags, I woke up this morning and looked at myself in the mirror and my first thought was: _this guy looks like he smokes weed and jerks off in movie theaters_. Okay, that laugh was a little too big, that’s a little hurtful, actually. But am I _wrong_, people. Am I _wrong._” 

His agent stops gesturing with the phone and seems to give up, walking away with his hands in the air.

“I mean I definitely don’t look like a guy who’s good at sex. I look like your weird uncle that buys you beer when you’re like, nine. I look like somebody who pretends he collects nudie magazines because he considers them ‘erotic art.’” Richie puts air quotes around _erotic art_, which was something he really had heard his Uncle Marty say one Christmas, before Uncle Marty stopped coming around. The crowd laughs again, long and sustained. 

No fucking wonder Richie is famous. He’s amazing at this. He can’t believe how easy it is.

“But yeah. I had this group of friends when I was a kid. We called ourselves the losers because — uh, we were losers.” Laughter. “Not very creative, I guess. Whatever, we were too busy frantically jerking off every time a girl looked at us to put much effort into naming conventions.” More laughter. “Anyway, we don’t talk anymore, apparently. Kind of fucked up, right? Like you spend all this time with people when you’re a kid and you fucking — love them or whatever and then you grow up and your life is amazing but you don’t have — but all you can think about sometimes is like, how the fuck is that dude Stanley doing? How come I let Eddie marry a carbon copy of his mom?”

Laughter.

“No. I’m serious. It’s like his mom’s _exact twin._” 

Laughter.

“Guys, stop laughing, I’m telling you, he married a woman who looks like a bad police sketch of his mother. And she’s not pretty! I mean the original didn’t give anybody much to work with — ” Laughter. “ — but _wow_, you know? Eddie’s a good-looking guy. He’s a shithead but he’s good-looking. Eddie looks like the kind of guy who gets phone numbers at bars, you know what I’m saying? Like if you had to choose between us and you didn’t know I was rich and famous and the funniest person alive — ” Laughter. 

“Fuck,” says Richie, feeling out of control, like he has no say about the words spilling out of his mouth, “I’m selling him really well. Maybe _I_ should date Eddie. I mean I look like shit but maybe that’s because my mom is fucking dead so I guess I need a boyfriend to teach me what the fuck a cumberbund is and how to live life as a fucking — adult, holy shit. I’m an adult. I’m a fucking grown up, I have to pay rent, is dementia genetic, what the _fuck_ is a cumberbund?”

Laughter. Laughter. Laughter.

“Seriously, someone tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to do,” Richie begs, and the crowd laughs.

-

He does a meet and greet after the show. All these women give him their numbers and then there’s — then this guy comes up to him, smiling a little, grin crooked, jaw angled, and slips a piece of paper into Richie’s hand while they shake, and he says, “Call if you want to find out what a cumberbund is,” and disappears and Richie — well, this isn’t his life, is it? This isn’t his body. This is either temporary or not happening at all, so what does Richie care if he ... what the fuck does anything matter, if it can all just change at any moment? If your friends can forget you? If your dad — if you don’t even have a number to call your remaining parent on?

Back at the apartment, where his agent drops him after yelling at him for like forty-five fucking minutes about going “off-script,” whatever the fuck _that_ means, he types the number into his phone and stares down at it. He could call. He could — that guy wanted sex, right? He definitely wanted sex, and Richie could call him, and get it. He could get it without risking anything, because this isn’t his body or his life or — his anything. Maybe it will be eventually but it isn’t now and he can always change it, can’t he, once he gets home?

A message comes through from  👻📝 . It says **_great set tonight buddy! felt like going rogue?_**

Richie frowns. _haha i guess_ he types back. 

** _not quite as edgy as what i wrote for you which i thought was your whole thing but still solid. loved the bit about the erotic art tho i haven’t heard them called “nudie magazines” in a while lmao_ **

Richie doesn’t know what the fuck word “lmao” is supposed to be, but his eyes catch on “what i wrote for you.” Something kind of nauseous rolls in his stomach. He scrolls up in the message box and there it is, one text at a time: **_got a good one for your next set — you’re banned from fb bc ur girlfriend caught u masterbating to her friend_**. Richie had responded_ fucking hilarious i’ll do that one on conan._

There are more, months and months worth of jokes,  👻📝 sending them piecemeal sometimes and then putting them together for a whole set, what order he should do them in, how the punchline should be delivered. Richie doesn’t write his own jokes. Richie lets some douchebag write his jokes and tell him how to deliver them.

Richie sits down heavily on the couch, staring down at the evidence. He’s — God, for a second he’d thought that he’d ... done it. That he’d done exactly what he wanted to do, become someone cool and lovable and — and sexually normal, or whatever, and instead he’s the same old fraud he’s always been. Instead he’s still just a dumb fucking idiot who can’t do anything right, a dumb fucking idiot pretending to be somebody else.

What the fuck has Old Richie done to his life? Richie feels a flash of — of _fury_, maybe, the same kind of fury he felt when he was attempting to beat Pennywise to death with a baseball bat, except it’s himself he wants to hit. Old fucking Richie. That useless piece of shit, who lives with some random guy and doesn’t talk to his old friends and _can’t even call his fucking parents_, who says someone else’s jokes and pretends that makes him funny, who doesn’t text women in bars back because of course he doesn’t! Of course he doesn’t! Richie doesn’t fucking want — well, okay, _some_times Richie wants but _most of the time_ he just. Most of the time he —

He calls the number. Fuck it. Fuck everything. He hopes it blows up. He hopes everything blows up in Old Richie’s face because Old Richie fucking deserves it.

“Hello?” says the voice. 

“Hey,” Richie says, mad, mad, so fucking _mad._ “This is Richie Tozier.”

The voice gives a long, quiet chuckle. “Yeah,” he says. “I thought you might call. Where do you want to meet?” 

Richie doesn’t fucking know how to drive, so he says, “Why don’t you come to mine?” and reads him the address from his driver’s license.

-

Richie has never been kissed, but he rides on the muscle memory that Old Richie has cultivated. His heart is beating faster than it ever has. Faster than it did when he was fighting a magical murder clown. The guy — “you can call me Jason” — hadn’t really waited to talk. He’d shown up and the second Richie opened the door, they were kissing. Richie feels like his hands might be shaking, so he anchors them to Jason’s waist and holds on, letting himself get backed into the living room, letting himself get pushed gently into sitting on the couch, Jason on his lap.

_Holyshitholyshitholyfuckingshitballs_, Richie thinks. 

Jason pulls back. His mouth is really red. He’s — hot, Richie thinks. Is he hot? Or is he just tall?

Wait, is _Richie_ hot? Richie’s definitely tall. 

“What do you want to do?” Jason asks, voice low, grinning.

“This is pretty good,” Richie squeaks, then clears his throat, embarrassed. “I mean. Uh. Yeah. This is — ”

Jason raises an eyebrow. “You want to make out all night?” he asks. “On the couch? Like we’re thirteen?”

“Okay, well, let’s not — disparage being thirteen,” Richie mutters defensively. “When they aren’t here to defend themselves.”

Jason laughs, settling onto Richie’s lap and playing with his long fucking hair. “Apologies to the thirteen-year-olds of the world. You really ... just want to make out?”

“No, I want to have sex,” Richie snaps, a little irritated. “It’s just. Uh. It’s — well, the thing is. I’ve definitely had sex before, obviously, of course, but — ”

Above him, Jason’s hands still. He sits back a little, taking in Richie’s face, then blows out a long sigh. “Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Are you — I mean I knew you were closeted, obviously, but are you — is this your first — ?”

“No,” lies Richie. “I mean. Probably no.”

The hands leave his hair and slide down to his shoulders. Jason makes a face. “Okay. Please don’t take this the wrong way but this is not the night I was trying to have.”

“Me either, buddy,” Richie says, the only truly honest thing he feels like he’s been able to say since he arrived in this stupid body, this stupid year, this stupid life. “Trust me.”

“Okay.” Jason slides off his lap and flops next to him on the couch, scrubbing at his forehead the way that Ben used to do. Richie suddenly thinks he might be about to cry, which is horrifying. He thought being past puberty meant that your emotions, like, chilled the fuck out. Richie feels like he’s experiencing the entire fucking spectrum of human emotion all at once. “Okay. Jesus.”

“Can’t you just pretend not to know?” asks Richie, a little plaintively, because it had been fine, before. It had all been totally fine.

“_No_ I can’t pretend not to _know_,” Jason tells him, appalled. “What the fuck. You’re having a whole sexuality crisis over here, I’m not a monster.”

“I just — I don’t know who I am but I don’t think I like it,” Richie hears himself saying, voice catching, nose starting to burn. Oh, God. Oh God, he is _definitely_ going to cry. He wishes Stan was here, or Bill. Bill always knew what to do. Bill always knew exactly what to do, even if he had no fucking idea, even if you knew he was winging it you just believed that it would work out. 

Richie buries his face in his hands and takes some deep breaths. This is horrifying. This is so fucking embarrassing. Jason puts a slow, hesitant hand on his shoulder. “Do you, uh,” he says, “have any ... friends ... I should call?”

“No,” Richie admits miserably. “No one is fucking talking to me because I guess I’m an asshole.”

“This is so sad, oh my God,” mutters Jason. “I really — I really really did not think that this was how this was gonna go.”

“You can go,” Richie says through his hands, meaning _please go._

“Yeah, the thing is, I kind of feel like I can’t?”

Riche sighs, dropping his head against the back of the couch. Maybe he should just throw himself out of a window. Maybe if he died he’d wake up back in his own fucking body. Maybe —

A buzzer goes off. “Did you order food?” asks Jason, looking puzzled. Richie frowns, shaking his head, and watches as Jason gets up and goes to the door. There’s a little speaker by the door, and he presses a button before saying, “Who is it?”

“Uh,” says a voice Richie had heard for the first time this morning but, he swears to fucking God, he’s never going to forget: “Stanley? Stanley Uris?”

And Richie bursts into tears.

-

Things happen in kind of a blur. Jason lets Stan up and himself out, patting Richie’s shoulder awkwardly and murmuring something indistinct to Stan as he goes. Stan — who looks — Jesus, they’re both so fucking _old_ — sits down on the ottoman across from Richie and just kind of stares blankly at him. Richie tries to stop crying, because he’s thirteen or maybe like, forty, and crying is stupid. But he can’t. He’s just — his life is so fucking bad, and Stan is here, even though they don’t talk anymore, even though Stan didn’t even _remember him_ on the phone, and he almost had sex with that guy, and what if he had? 

Why hadn’t he?

“Look,” Stan says, voice shaking a little, “I feel a little insane, being here.”

Richie nods, sniffing in a hunk of snot. He drags the back of his hand across his nose. This isn’t the Stan he wants but it’s some version of him, and honestly, Richie doesn’t feel like he’s in much of a position to be choosy.

“It’s like. It’s like I know — I know that you’re very important,” Stan continues, speaking slowly, deliberately, just like he had when he was doing his Torah recitation. Trying so hard to make sure he’s doing everything right. “And this afternoon, when I hung up the phone, I had this moment where it felt like I remembered everything. I looked down at the phone and thought _Richie needs my help_, but the moment I did I felt crazy because it all went away again. I couldn’t remember why you would need my help. Why I would give it to you.”

Richie swallows. He points out, “But you came anyway.”

Stan shoves a hand through his unruly hair, letting out a shuddery sigh. “I mean. Yeah. I just. I couldn’t shake — I couldn’t stop thinking about — I couldn’t remember anything but I looked you up on YouTube and watched your clips and I kept thinking ... Trashmouth. That’s what we called you. You came to my bar mitzvah.”

“_Finally_ a little _recognition_,” Richie mutters, and then after a moment of deliberation adds, “bitch.”

Stan laughs, and reaches out to gently shove Richie away. “So, uh. That guy who left. He said you were having some kind of a crisis.”

Richie’s stomach goes cold. He looks at Stan and then away, down at his hands. He doesn’t want to say anything that would make Stan leave again. Not when he just got here. Not when he — remembers, kind of, almost. Richie would probably rather eat his own tongue then say anything to make Stan leave him behind.

He shakes his head, pressing his lips together. “Me? Nah. I’m fine. I’m great. I’m super famous.”

Stan gives him a look. “Is he your boyfriend?” he asks calmly. “Did you break up?”

Richie freezes, all the air turning solid in his lungs.

“Because I’m pretty good at breakups,” Stan continues blithely. “I got dumped a lot before Patricia agreed to marry me. This one time in college, this girl Angie — ”

“You wouldn’t — that would be okay?” Richie blurts, hands coming up to grip Stan’s wrists, to keep him there. If he’s going to want to leave he’s going to have to shake Richie off. “If he was? My boyfriend?”

Stan frowns. “It’s twenty-sixteen,” he says, as if that’s supposed to mean something. “I’d be a pretty fucking bad person if I had a problem with it. Though I guess I’m a little surprised, given your passionate sexual history with Eddie’s mom.”

Stan looks startled at his own words. “Holy shit, _Eddie_. I remember Eddie, kind of. He was small and an asshole.”

“_Thank_ you, yes, I was _always_ saying this and nobody believed me!”

“How did I forget Eddie?”

“Fuck Eddie, pal, how did you forget _me_?”

“Obviously my memory got magically wiped,” Stan says, rolling his eyes. He looks for a minute so much like Young Stan that Richie thinks he might cry again. “You’re a pain in the ass but you’re a _memorable_ pain in the ass, Rich, and it’s not like there isn’t precedent for weird and bad magic fucking with us, which _oh my God_ I can’t believe I _literally forgot Pennywise the fucking clown._”

Richie tips forward and doesn’t stop until he is facedown on Stan’s lap, his forehead pressed to the edge of Stan’s knees, staring down at the floor. He can feel himself shaking but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a shit about anything because Stan is here and Stan remembers It and Stan is going to take care of him. Stan is going to make everything okay, because this isn’t just regular Stan, it’s _grown up_ Stan, so that’s basically Stan but with superpowers.

Richie tells the floor, “That’s not the weirdest thing that’s happening to us right now.”

Above him, Stan snorts. “No? You don’t think that me forgetting a murderous clown that tried to eat all of us the summer we were thirteen isn’t taking the cake? Okay, Richie. What’s the weirdest thing that’s happening to us right now?”

Richie closes his eyes and doesn’t stir as Stan’s hand comes to rest on top of his head. He isn’t sure he’s ever going to move again. He’s going to stay right here, on his couch, with the only person in the world who he cares about at all. 

Richie says, “Well, for one thing, I time traveled yesterday and I’m actually thirteen?” and Stan startles so bad that Richie topples over and goes clattering to the floor. “Ow! Dude, what the fuck,” he grumbles, rubbing at where his elbow collided with the hardwood. 

“You _time traveled_?”

“Is there an echo in here?” Richie grumbles, unable to help himself.

Stan is staring at him. He reaches out slowly to poke at Richie’s cheek. “You don’t look thirteen,” he points out.

“Well, this is my old guy body, obviously.”

“Okay, well. We’re not that old.”

“You guys are fucking ancient. My knees hurt for like, _no_ reason. There’s _hair_ on my _shoulders_. Also, the backs of my knees keep sweating, like what the fuck is _that_ about?”

“Oh my God, you _are_ thirteen.”

Richie makes a gesture that’s supposed to indicate a sentiment of _fucking duh._ Stan keeps staring at him like Richie is going to sprout boobs or something, rather than being helpful, so Richie drags himself back up onto the couch and crosses his arms over his chest, self-conscious.

Stan says, “Wait. Did you fuck that guy?”

Richie’s shoulders hunch up automatically to his ears. He juts his chin out. “So what if I did?” he snaps. “Maybe regular Old Richie fucks guys all the time. Maybe he’s a — a real ... a real guy fucker.”

“You’re _thirteen_,” Stan reminds him. “You are _way_ too young to be having sex! _Especially_ sex with adults!”

“What are you gonna do, call my mom? Tell her that the guy who looks like he spent the last five nights binge drinking grey water is actually a thirteen year old time traveler?” Richie jokes, even though something in his chest warms a little, that Stan is like, trying to protect him, or whatever. “Well, joke’s on you. Apparently she's dead.”

“_Jesus_, Richie.” Stan gives him a long look and then reaches out to pat his knee. “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever, it’s not _my_ life,” Richie dismisses, because fuck Old Richie. “Whoever this moron is, it’s not _me, _señor. This guy’s pathetic. He’s — he’s this super unfunny asshole who doesn’t have any friends, and obviously that’s because that fucking clown magicked us all into, like — the Star Trek mirror-verse.”

The moment he says it out loud, Richie feels a flood of relief. He’s right. He has to be right. This isn’t his life, it can’t be; it’s a weird alternate universe that It created where everything is shit. His life is shit, and Stan’s life is probably shit, and Eddie married his mom, and who _knows_ what happened to poor Bev and Bill and Ben and Mike. 

Richie sinks back against the couch. “It’s the only explanation,” he decides. “I’m, like. Dark Richie.”

“Dark Richie,” Stan repeats dubiously. “Does that make me Dark Stan?”

“Well, yeah. Probably. How shitty is your life?”

“My life is fine.”

“It can’t be _that_ fine, you live in Atlanta. You’re an _accountant_. You _forgot_ me.” He says the last bit a little more accusatorily than he meant to, because he knows Stan feels bad about that, and anyway he can’t really be blamed when obviously forgetting Richie was a ploy by It to make sure Stan’s life sucked. In a way, he guessed it was a compliment.

Stan’s eye twitches a little, just like it used to when Richie was getting under his skin. It’s good to know that even as an adult, Stan has his tells. “You stopped wearing your yarmulke,” Richie notes, remembering that he’d wondered about it, before.

Stan shrugs. He pushes up off his knees to stand and brings his jacket to the door, shrugging it off and hanging it neatly on a hook. Richie gets up and follows him to the kitchen, where he makes himself at home by opening the fridge and pulling out two beers. “Yeah, well, I guess my faith in the fullness of knowledge contained in the Torah kind of took a hit after finding out that multidimensional cannibal clowns exist.” Richie holds his hand out for a beer but Stan tucks the second one away behind him. “No way, you’re thirteen. You can have a glass of water.”

“Aw, fuck you, man,” Richie whines. “Look at me. This body’s gotta have a tolerance for alcohol that’s off the _charts_.”

“That body gets hangovers that will make you want to be dead,” Stan corrects. “And even if you’re right, I’m not aiding and abetting your headlong rush toward liver failure.” He opens the cupboard behind him and gestures pointedly toward the empty glasses.

Richie fills one up with water from the tap, grumbling at Stan all the while. He slumps into one of the chairs at the table and drinks it in one go, glaring furiously as Stan gently sips his beer, blinking up at the ceiling. He lets out a long, shaky breath. “So. Do you think — you being back. Do you think that’s because It is?”

Richie puts his glass down. He hasn’t thought about this, which in hindsight seems like it should have been the only thing he was doing. “I guess,” he admits. “I was kind of busy freaking out about being here to think much about why or I got here.”

Stan nods, slow and resigned. He taps a finger against the water bottle. “Every time I looked at this scar, my whole body felt like — I didn’t remember getting it but just thinking about it made me go absolutely cold,” he tells Richie, and holds up his oath hand. Richie can still see the scar on it, a faint line.

It takes Richie a moment to understand what Stan is saying, but the moment he does he has to close his eyes and start counting backwards from ten so that he doesn’t start crying again. “Fuck,” he mutters. “Fuck. _Fuck._ I _just_ did this. I _just_ — ”

When he looks up, Stan has put his beer down and is approaching Richie slowly, like he’s afraid Richie might startle. “I don’t want to do it again,” he says plaintively. “Stan, I really, really don’t want to do it again. Not so soon. Not — when I look like a fucking Nickelodeon raccoon.”

“I don’t want to either,” Stan admits, kneeling in front of him and taking both his hands. “Look, maybe we don’t have to. Maybe this is like, a glitch, or something. I haven’t heard from any of the others, have you?”

Richie shakes his head.

“Okay. So let’s just — play it by ear, all right? Let’s sort you out first, and then worry about ... what happens next.”

Richie squeezes Stan’s hands. “Don’t ... please don’t leave me until I’m back in my real body,” he says, quickly, like taking off a Band-Aid. But he can’t bear the thought of Stan leaving him. He doesn’t have anybody else. “Okay? Do you promise?”

Stan takes a really long time to answer, looking down at their interlocked fingers in thought before giving a tiny, resigned sigh. “Okay, Trashmouth,” he promises. “Until we get you back to where you’re supposed to be, I won’t go anywhere that you can’t follow me.”

He gives Richie a little half smile and Richie, feeling for the first time since he got here like something has gone right, gives it back.

-

In the morning, Richie finds Stan in the kitchen talking to Theodore. He still hasn’t quite figured out what their relationship is supposed to be, so he just kind of gives a half wave and buries himself in a bowl of cereal. 

Stan, it turns out, actually really loves his wife, which is ... nice, Richie guesses, though it makes him wonder what it is exactly about Stanley’s existence that makes him Dark Stanley, if it’s not his marriage. He’s apparently told her that Richie is an old school friend who is having a nervous breakdown and she has told him to stay in LA until he can get Richie sorted out. Honestly, it’s close enough to the truth. Maybe none of this is actually real, and Richie is like, locked up in a looney bin somewhere. Maybe he’s in the same one as his mom had been, and they never recognized each other.

He pushes _that_ thought away as hard and as fast as he can. 

Theodore leaves them to go to ... whatever job he has, and then Stan disappears to call his office and tell them he’s taking a vacation to care for a sick relative. Richie uses this opportunity to fuck around with Old Richie’s computer. It can do, like, _so much shit_, but mostly he wants to stare at Eddie’s Facebook page and try to figure out how he’s evil. It seems obvious that the fact that he married Mrs. K 2.0 is evidence enough that they’re in the Mirror Verse, but if Old Richie sucks this bad, surely so does Old Eddie, right? 

“God, of course you’re here nine seconds and have already discovered social media.” Stan thwacks the back of his head gently, tugging the computer away. When he sees what’s on it he gives Richie an extremely knowing look.

“Yeah so what _is_ Facebook?” Richie asks. “Why do we all have one? Is it a government thing, or like, what is the point of it?”

“Basically what you’re doing,” Stan explains. He delicately wipes dust off the screen. “Staring at people you know for mostly sad reasons. Also for finding out which of your relatives are bigots.”

“Is it your Aunt Doreen, because I bet it’s your Aunt Doreen.”

Stan opens his mouth, presumably to defend Aunt Doreen, then makes a contemplative face and shrugs. Richie pumps a fist. He loves to be right. “Look. We need to figure out how to get you back where you belong, all right? Twenty-sixteen will not survive thirteen-year-old Richie Tozier. I can’t let you get your hands on memes.”

“What the fuck’s a meme?”

“Exactly. So ... I think we need to call the group together. If this is a clown thing, then we ... I mean. I think whatever we do, it has to be all of us, together. United.” 

Something heavy falls into Richie’s stomach. “Are we going to Derry?” he asks. 

Stan shakes his head. “No,” he says, forcefully. “No fucking way. We’re going to make everyone come here.” He glances around the apartment, then amends, “Well, maybe not literally _here_, in this apartment. This place is disgusting. There’s a layer of dust thicker than my thumb on the bathtub.”

“So what, so we don’t take baths,” Richie bristles. “Why clean it if you’re not using it?”

“Good to know you’re as disgusting at forty as you were at thirteen,” says Stan. “Listen, I’ve been up since like six doing some planning. I think — you said you guys just defeated It, right? That’s when you’re from?”

“Nineteen eighty-nine,” Richie confirms. “Summer of.”

“Okay. So clearly there was — so clearly something happened. Some weird magical ... something. Maybe when we killed It, there was like, an expulsion of something. Right? It doesn’t have to mean It’s back.”

Richie nods. It seems as plausible an idea as any, he guesses. 

“Right. So I think what we need to do is bring everyone back together. That was always the thing, right? When we split up, everything went wrong, but when we were together, we always ... figured it out.” 

Richie nods again, more eagerly this time. He has no fucking idea what he’s supposed to do, but the idea of having everyone back — the idea of, like, getting the chance to fix whatever fucked up thing happened to Dark Richie to make his life so shitty, that was. That was good. He could go back and relax knowing that even if everything goes to shit, eventually he’s going to at the very least get his friends back, and that was something right?

_You could find your dad,_ his stupid brain reminds him as Stan turns the laptop around so that Richie can open the password and they can hunt down the appropriate phone numbers. _Just tell Stan to look him up. _

**_No_**, he thinks back at himself. Dark Richie’s life is fucked up enough. Richie doesn’t also need to confirm that his dad doesn’t even think about him anymore. He’s probably got some new family. He’s probably out in Bangor correcting their teeth right now. It’s been like thirty years, and he was forgetting Richie’s name in 1989. What hope is there for 2016?

He takes a long shower and lets Stan do all the work, but when it comes time to call he snatches phone. “I wanna do Eddie,” he insists. “You’re going to be nice to him and then he’ll never come.”

“We should be nice to all of them,” Stan scolds disapprovingly. “They’re our friends and they don’t remember us.”

“Exactly, it’s like taking candy from a baby,” says Richie, and dials in the number on the list. 

It rings a handful of times before Eddie picks up, and even though his voice has dropped a few octaves, it’s unmistakeably _Eddie._ “...Hello?”

Richie panics and hangs up.

Stan gives him a look so dry that Richie swallows on instinct. “Really well done, Rich,” he says. “Very convincing. He’ll definitely come now.”

“Shut up,” Richie mutters, and his phone vibrates in his hand. 

Eddie is calling back. “Who is this?” he asks when Richie picks up. “I get calls every fucking day from you spamming assholes and I swear to God I will report you to the FCC. I am not fucking worried about my student loans defaulting, you piece of —”

“Edward Spaghedward,” Richie blurts. “Uh. Hello. Hi. It’s me. I mean, it’s Richie.”

There’s a long silence. Richie braces himself for Eddie to say, “Richie who?” but after about fifteen seconds, Eddie instead asks, “Richie ... Tozier?”

Richie jerks his head up to stare at Stan, who mouths _what???_

“You remember me,” Richie breathes. “Eds! Eddie! You know me?”

“Of course I know you,” Eddie answers, sounding confused. “You’re definitely the most famous person who is also from my hometown. But, uh, why are you calling me?”

Richie’s heart sinks, and he follows it down into a chair. Of course. Eddie doesn’t_ remember_ him, he just ... knows him. Knows _of_ him. Richie doesn’t know why he’d thought — why it should be any different. 

“I’m — listen, I’m putting together a little reunion tomorrow,” Richie tells him, and looks down at the little script Stan had written out neatly, on lined paper, because he can’t think of anything else to say. Stan nods approvingly at him. “I know it’s really short notice but I would really appreciate it if you could come. I’ll buy your flight to LA.”

“You want to fly me out to LA for ... a Derry High School reunion?”

“Well, it’s not going to be the whole school,” Richie mutters. “Just — the people I liked.”

“You liked the people in Derry?”

“I liked _some_ people in Derry.”

“You liked _me_?”

Richie’s throat closes up. “Yeah, Eds,” he manages. He glances at Stan and then away again, because Stan’s face is a picture of soft understanding and it makes Richie want to cry, kind of. “Yeah, I liked you a lot.”

After another pause, Eddie lets out a little sigh. “Look. I don’t know. This is really short notice, man.”

“I know.” Richie tries and fails to keep the desperation out of his voice when he adds, “Please come anyway. _Please._”

“I’ll ... have to check with my wife.”

“Why, is she literally your mom?” 

Stan reaches out to slap the side of Richie’s head. “_You didn’t see the pictures_,” Richie hisses over Eddie’s immediate reply of, “Fuck you, bro.” Stan makes the universal gesture for _stop_ and then bats Richie’s hand away when he flicks him off. 

“Look, I’ll call you back and let you know,” Eddie says.

“Please come,” says Richie. “Seriously, I’ll buy your flight and a super nice hotel room. Bring your wife if you want, I don’t give a shit.”

“Wow, thanks, that’s _super_ generous,” Eddie mutters. “Sounds like she’ll have a great time.”

“Okay, that’s good for now,” Stan interjects before Richie can say anything else, snatching the phone from his hand. “Thanks Eddie, see you tomorrow, let us know the cost of the flight so we can reimburse you.” 

He hangs up over Richie’s voice, suddenly slightly more alarmed, asking, “Wait, who’s _we_?”

-

After that, Richie leaves the phone calls to Stan. _Let the adults talk, _he’d said, and Richie had thought, hey, if Stan wants to carry this group project, Richie is more than happy to coast. There was a reason he had always wanted to be with Ben, Bill, or Stan in classes that had lab projects. He and Bev would usually just fuck around to see what they could make explode, and Mike always wanted to go rogue with a little experimental learning, and he and Eddie usually just ended up fighting over a beaker and shattering glass all over the floor. 

He is looking at Google Image photos of the Lennox Care Home and writing down half-formed jokes about his mom being dead when Stan comes sliding into the living room, eyes wide, phone held out in front of him.

“Mike remembers,” he says, and Richie sits up so fast that the laptop crashes to the floor. “Mike. Tell Richie — tell Richie what you told me.”

From the phone, Mike’s voice says, “Hi, Trashmouth.”

“He called me Trashmouth!” Richie cries, heart lighting up. Of course Mike would remember. Good old Mike. Good, reliable Mike, with his good, reliable brain. “Mike! You called me Trashmouth!”

Mike’s laugh is really, really deep, and smooth as — as — as a smooth thing. He says warmly, “Yeah, well, that’s how I think of you still, I guess.”

“You remember me,” Richie breathes. He is clutching the phone over Stan’s hand, both of them bent over it like if they lean close enough they could reach in and pull Mike through it. “How come you remember me and nobody else does?”

There’s a long, slow pause. “Something happens,” he explains, voice slow and careful. “When you leave Derry. It becomes — hazy, I guess. The longer you’re away, the hazier it gets, until —”

“Until it feels like a dream,” Stan interrupts. “Like a really vivid dream that you know you had but can’t quite remember.”

“Exactly.”

“So, but — why didn’t that happen to you?”

Mike coughs. He sounds uncomfortable. “I, uh. I didn’t leave Derry.”

“Why the _fuck not_?” Richie blurts, only to have Stan stamp down on his foot, hard. “Ow! Stan, what the fuck. Derry sucks. Mike _hates_ Derry. Man, I thought you were gonna go be, like — what was that thing you liked? The lame nerd thinking thing?”

“... Moral philosophy,” Mike supplies. He sounds amused, but there is an undercurrent still of worry. “Richie, why do _you _remember?”

Stan gestures at him to be quiet, but this is _Mike_. Why would they need to hide anything from Mike? So instead he announces, “Well, you see, I time traveled. I look like I’m as close to the grave as you guys but literally two days ago I was thirteen and it was nineteen eighty-nine.”

“What,” says Mike. 

Stan, looking very tired as he scrubs his forehead with his free hand, says, “Yeah, so, uh. We were hoping you could make it out to LA.”

-

Richie is so nervous he throws up. Stan pats his back awkwardly, elbow-length cleaning gloves on because he’s been anxiously deep cleaning Richie’s apartment since they hung up with Mike. Now they’re both in his cramped bathroom, Richie over the toilet and Stan hovering between him and tub, which he’s bleaching for the third time.

“I honestly thought I’d grow up to be cooler than this,” Richie mutters. “I mean, I knew _you’d_ be a neat-freak lameass, but I thought I’d be like, chill and — ”

“Chill? When have you ever been chill?” Stan shoots back. “You yourself used to have a joke about your undiagnosed ADHD. The _H_ in there stands for ‘hyperactivity.’”

Richie turns his head to blink in Stan’s direction. “What’s ADHD?” he asks. 

“You know how you’re either so bored you think you’re going to die or your brain feels like there are bees in it?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s ADHD.”

“Huh,” says Richie, before reaching up and flushing the toilet. He drags the back of his sleeve across his mouth. “Okay. I think I’m ... uh, empty. And they’re going to be here soon so we should probably crack a window to make sure nobody passes out from bleach poisoning.”

Stan makes a face, but follows Richie onto his feet. “You can’t die from bleach air inhalation,” he corrects, rolling his eyes. “But I guess we should probably ... get ready. Should we have ordered a pizza or something?”

“Eddie is probably lactose intolerant,” Richie jokes. Stan laughs, and some of the tension breaks; they go together to the living room, where Stan throws out his cleaning gloves and Richie settles nervously onto one end of the couch. “It’s going to be fine,” he tells Stan, more confidently than he feels. “They’re going to help. We’re the Losers. All of us make it or none of us do, right?”

Stan chews his lip, looking away. “Yeah,” he says quietly. 

“So, there you go. They’re going to come. I mean — _you_ came, and you barely remembered me.”

“I came _because_ I barely remembered you,” Stan reminds him. “If I’d ... if it had been Mike calling, asking me to come back to Derry because fucking ... Pennywise was back, I don’t ... ” He doesn’t quite meet Richie’s eyes. “I don’t know, Rich. I don’t know what I’d have done.”

Richie frowns at him, not understanding. “You’d have come,” he says. “Of course you’d have come. You’re Stan. If anyone would have been an asshole and blown it off, it would definitely have been Dark Richie. That guy's a real dickbag.”

Stan’s laugh is thin, but it’s a laugh, so Richie will take it. He’s opening his mouth to respond when the buzzer goes off. Stan and Richie share a look, and then Richie blows out a long breath. Stan sits down on the couch, knee bouncing anxiously, chewing on the edge of his thumbnail. He gives Richie a nod, and Richie nods back, and holds down the buzzer. “Which one of you losers is it?” he asks, and ignores the despairing look Stan gives him. 

“It’s Beverly. Bev,” says Bev, and Richie buzzes her up so fast his fingernail catches on the Braille bumps. He bounces on the balls of his feet as he waits, and the second he hears the elevator ding he flings himself out of the front door to welcome her. 

She’s —

“Holy shit, Bev,” he says, skidding to a halt in front of her and shoving his hands into his sweatpants pockets, suddenly shy, “look at you. You’re a fucking megababe.”

Bev blinks at him for a long, slow minute, and Richie remembers that she doesn’t really know him, that as far as she knows he’s just some random LA comedian, and he’s about to apologize when her gaze sharpens and she says, “Yeah, well, _somebody_ had to carry the team in the looks department and it sure as hell wasn’t gonna be you, Trashmouth.”

“TRASHMOUTH,” Richie yells happily, launching himself again and picking her up in a swinging hug. She laughs, hands coming to his shoulders, letting him hug her. Richie can feel when she sees Stan through the open door, can feel her wave at him. Too excited to let her go, he carries her into the apartment and sets her down in front of Stan like a cat bringing a mouse to its owner. “She called me Trashmouth, Stanley! She remembers! I knew Bev would. I knew the second Bev saw us, she’d — ”

“Hi, Bev,” Stan interrupts, smiling. He stands and accepts a hug, giving her a single tight squeeze. “It’s good to see you.”

“Good to see you too, Walrus.”

Stan lets out a quick laugh. “Walrus,” he repeats. “I’d forgotten. Ninth grade history class. Mr. Faris’s accent made it sound like — ”

“Walrus and Mosh,” Bev completes. 

“Cool band name,” says Richie as the buzzer goes again. He bounds back to the door, energy buzzing through him. Bev is here. She remembers. Bev remembers and Stan remembers. Maybe they don’t remember everything but they remember Richie, and that’s enough, that’s a start.

Next to arrive at Ben and Bill, together in the lift. Bill is shorter than Richie always assumed he’d be, kind of stocky and worn around the eyes, but Richie has Googled him (Richie loves Google) and he figures when all you do is write horror stories about terrible things, you’re going to give yourself wrinkles.

Ben, on the other hand, is — well, there’s no way to describe it other than to say he is a stone cold fucking fox.

“Ben-ja-min,” Richie cries, pinching his arms and reaching out to feel his abs without any conscious decision to do so. “Jesus Christ! Look at you! You’re so hot I’ll bet Eddie’s mom is jerking off to you right now as we _speak._”

“Beep fucking beep, Richie,” chides Ben, as if yesterday he hadn’t said _Stanley who? _into the phone after picking up. 

Richie ignores him, throwing his arms around Bill and Ben’s shoulders and dragging them into the apartment. He beams at Bev and Stan as they move in to say their welcomes. “Look how hot Ben got,” Richie announces to the room proudly. Look at his stupid friends, all here, all grown up, all hot as fuck. “Bev, Bev, feel his abs. Feel them, there are like eight of them.”

Bev laughs, and when she reaches out Richie notices a dark bruise around her wrist. He frowns, but doesn’t get a chance to peer closer because she tugs her sweater down over her hand as she runs it down Ben’s stomach — Ben, who’s gone the deepest shade of red that Richie thinks it is possible for a person to go.

Stan goes to the door when the buzzer rings again, Richie too absorbed with making Ben pull up his shirt; Bill has collapsed onto the couch laughing as Bev stands at Richie’s shoulder, humming like a professor observing a chemical reaction in a lab. 

And then Eddie’s voice says, “Stop fucking molesting Ben, you pervert,” and Richie’s head jerks up so fast it would have tumbled right off his neck if it weren’t attached.

“Eddie Spaghetti,” Richie breathes, pulling his hand away from Ben’s washboard. “Did you bring your momwife?”

“Fuck you, bro,” Eddie says, pointing threateningly in Richie’s direction. “No, she didn’t come, and that’s not fucking fu — ”

Richie is hugging him before he can finish yelling at him, so happy to hear his stupid voice that he can’t help it. When he pulls away, Eddie is blinking wordlessly at him. “I’m just so fucking happy to see you,” Richie blurts. “And you remember? You remember me?”

“Obviously I remember you, asshole,” Eddie tells him, hesitantly bringing his hands up to float next to Richie’s waist. “I mean, I — well. Actually. I guess I _had_ kind of ... I don’t want to say I forgot you guys but I — ”

“It just felt so unreal,” Bev says in agreement. “You all felt like a —”

“Dream,” interjects Bill. “Like a dream I knew I had but couldn’t — ”

“Ever quite remember,” Ben murmurs.

Richie finds Stan’s eyes in the crowd of them. He makes a face meant to indicate that Stan should explain. Stan makes a face back, probably to force Richie do it. “You’re the adult,” Richie hisses.

“It’s your house!” Stan whispers furiously back.

“Uh, guys,” Ben interrupts gently, “We can hear you.”

“I forgot they used to do that,” Bill notes marvels. “It’s like looking into a remembrall.”

Richie turns to frown at him. “What the fuck is a remembrall?” he asks.

“You know, Harry Potter?” asks Bill, looking puzzled. “Come on, Rich, surely you saw the movies at least.” 

“The ... movies by some guy named Harry Potter?” 

Stan slaps a hand over his face. “So, Richie time traveled, or maybe is experiencing some kind of psychological break,” he says tiredly. “The last thing he remembers was going to sleep thirteen years old in nineteen eight-nine, not long after we defeated ...” He trails off, glancing nervously around as if saying the name will summon It.

Bev closes her eyes. Into the silence she murmurs, “Pennywise. Oh God.” 

The buzzer goes, and all of them jump, Eddie letting out a short shriek and grabbing onto Richie’s arm in blind panic. Richie grips him back.

“It’s just — it’s gonna be Mike,” Stan says, but his voice shakes a little. 

Bill goes to the buzzer and pushes it. “H-h-hello?” he forces out, and Mike’s voice answers, “Hey, it’s Mike. Hanlon. From Derry?” 

The whole room deflates in relief. Eddie gives a nervous laugh, and then Bill follows, and all of them have collapsed on one another on the various seating in the living room by the time Mike gets upstairs, a notebook and file folder tucked under his arm. 

He stands in the doorway, taking them in, smiling so much that there are deep crevasses around his eyes. Mike got hot, too, Richie thinks; what the fuck happened to him? Why’s he the only one who looks like a fucking discarded muppet?

“Let this meeting of the Losers Club begin,” Mike announces, grinning, and Richie lets out a cheer.

-

They do order pizza. Eddie gets a gluten-free, lactose-free, taste-free monstrosity. (“None pizza with left beef,” jokes Ben, and everybody but Richie laughs. Richie doesn’t get it, but Ben also got a _salad_, so what does he know?) They sit cross-legged on Richie’s floor, everyone drinking beer except him because Stan keeps snatching it out of his hand. 

“It’s so weird that you’re thirteen,” Eddie says from next to him, leaning in to inspect his face. “You look like shit.”

“Well, keeping up with your mom really takes it out of me,” Richie snaps back, but the second Eddie makes to turn away Richie jams his elbow into Eddie's side, just to keep him looking. Eddie says stuff like _you look like shit_ but he keeps stealing glances at Richie anyway. He’s sitting next to him, keeps touching him, plucking pieces of cheese from his box.

Richie slaps his hand away, but then hands a slice over anyway. Eddie eats it with relish. “If you’re not lactose in-fucking-tolerant why did you get that pizza?” Richie whines, aggrieved.

“Habit,” admits Eddie on a shrug.

“S-s-so,” Bill interjects before Richie can say anything. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and shakes his head, clearly frustrated by the stutter. “Have we decided whether it’s real time travel or if R-rrrrrichie is having a psychotic episode?”

Richie flinches involuntarily, and Eddie leans into his shoulder. “Richie’s whole personality is a psychotic episode,” he says, but it sounds like a comfort, so Richie forks over a piece of pepperoni, which Eddie takes as his due, without acknowledgment. _I kissed some guy named Jason_, he wants to say, just to see Eddie’s reaction. But he doesn’t. Maybe out of habit. Maybe because he’s kind of a coward, sometimes.

“Well, it’s been twenty-seven years,” Mike reminds them. “Just about. But there haven’t been — I don’t think he’s woken up. Pennywise. I’ve been monitoring activity in Derry, but there just hasn’t been anything unusual yet.”

“So Derry sucks balls but just in like, the normal Derry way,” Richie summarizes. “Great.”

“But,” Mike continues, ignoring him, “maybe it’s not the timing on this end that matters. Maybe it’s the timing on — the other end.”

Bill frowns. “You mean maybe it’s n-not this Richie who triggered the — the change?”

“Exactly.”

Stan’s brow furrows and he rubs a thumb along the edge of Richie’s coffee table, erasing imaginary dust. “So you’re saying grown up Richie did something to get sent back, and this Richie just got pulled along for the ride?”

“Of-fucking-course this is Dark Richie’s fault,” Richie grumbles. “_Man_, that guy sucks.”

“Hey,” says Bev, kicking out lightly at Richie’s shin. “Leave him alone. He’s my friend.”

“_I’m_ your friend,” Richie corrects. “You literally forgot him until like an hour and a half ago.”

“Yeah but I’m loyal,” Bev insists. “His life is probably complicated by adult shit you don’t understand.”

“Even if he’s a piece of shit, he’s _our_ piece of shit,” Eddie agrees. “So fuck off.”

Richie groans, slumping down to the floor and blinking up at the ceiling. “I somehow forgot you guys were all gonna be grown ups who treated me like a kid,” he mutters. “Stan won’t even let me drink.”

“You _are_ a kid,” Ben points out. “And hey, I’m not drinking either, so it’s not like you’re being left out.” He says the second thing with his voice pitched up like a camp counselor announcing crafts time. Like Richie is supposed to be glad that Ben is, what, skipping the beer calories so that he can focus on enjoying his truly tragic salad from fucking Pizza Hut, which he’s barely even eating anyway, probably because it’s a _salad_ from _Pizza Hut_?

“I’m thirteen, not a fucking baby,” Richie mutters. “And I _did_ just kill like a really fucked up clown, so I’m not sure where you get off calling me — ”

Mike clears his throat. “We need to find out what happened,” he says, giving Richie a quelling look. “We need to know whether this is the action of our Pennywise, or past Pennywise. I found this ritual ... I have no idea if it will work. But if it does, it could allow us to question — um. Are we really calling him Dark Richie?”

“Yes,” says Richie at the same time that everyone else says, “No.”

“... Other Richie,” Mike amends diplomatically. “If this works like I think it does, we should be able to pull him into the present.”

Richie rubs his hand together. “Great,” he says. “I’ve got some shit to say to that douchebag.”

“Why don’t you curb the attitude,” Ben suggests, in a tone of voice that indicates it's not actually a _suggestion_. Ben is going to be a great mom one day.

Bill snorts, sharing a look with Stan that Richie doesn’t quite care for, and then claps his hands together. “Right. So what do we do?”

Mike holds up his folder, a pleased nerd. “Everyone get into a circle. I need a knife, something of Other Richie’s, and something of — well, this Richie.”

“Richie Prime,” Richie suggests as Stan goes to the kitchen to retrieve a knife. “I mean pretty much everything in this place is Dark Richie’s, but I don’t have any of my shit here. Except — me, I guess.” He has a sudden thought: "Shit, what if Ted comes back?"

Eddie jostles him. "Who the fuck is Ted?" he asks.

"My boyfriend," Richie deadpans, then looks at Stan as he comes back into the room. "Actually, I don't know, _is_ he my boyfriend? I've been afraid to ask."

Stan sighs, handing the knife to Mike. "He's not coming back tonight," he assures the room. "He's spending the weekend with his parents out in Ojai. They have an orange grove."

Eddie opens his mouth, probably to say something disparaging about orange groves, and is diverted by Mike saying, "Okay, let's get started. Richie, go get something of Other Richie's that we can use."

Richie goes into the bedroom to find something to use. He decides on a pair of glasses — they’re on the bedside table, clearly discarded and not much used, but glasses are familiar in a way that Richie’s contacts aren’t. When he brings them back out to the group, Mike has organized everyone into a circle by the coffee table and cut open along the familiar scar on all the other losers’ hands. He directs Richie into the middle of the circle and cuts his hand too, then has him grip the glasses in his bloody palm.

The losers join hands around Richie and Mike begins to read from his folder. Richie feels something begin to roil in his stomach and has just enough time to say, “Oh, hey, that feels — really bad,” before everything goes dark.


	5. yeah i keep running back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Breathe,” Young Richie commands him, looking panicked. “If you kill that body I’m fucked!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO CLOSE TO THE END. sorry this chapter is extremely emo, but i am myself a very emo person. so what're you gonna do.

“What the fuck!” Eddie shouts, wrenching his hand free from Bill and Bev and diving into the middle of the circle, barely catching Richie’s body before his head hits the coffee table. “What the fuck! Richie! What the fuck!”

“Is he breathing?” Bev asks, relatively calmly, which isn’t saying much. “Eddie. Focus. Is he breathing?”

Eddie puts his ear down to Richie’s mouth. “He’s breathing,” he confirms. “But like. Not a lot.”

They manage to shift Richie to the couch, Stan leaning nervously over them, taking the glasses from Richie’s limp hand and putting them on the side table, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Mike frowns down at his paper. “That — wasn’t supposed to happen,” he admits. “I don’t know — ”

Eddie’s glare is so vicious it’s surprising that cuts don’t open up on Mike’s cheeks. “Well, figure it out! Someone get my bag, I have my inhaler and an EpiPen in it, just in case.”

“What on earth is an EpiPen going to do?” Ben points out. “He’s not having an allergic reaction to _magic_.”

“Shut up, Salad Boy,” Eddie snaps. He brushes Richie’s unruly hair off his forehead and slips under him so that his head is resting on Eddie’s lap.

“Eddie,” Bill scolds, firmly but not unkindly. “Come on, man.”

Eddie blows a long breath out of his nose. He lets Bev rest her hand comfortingly on his shoulder and budges up to make room for Stan to take a seat on the far end of the couch, lifting Richie’s feet up onto his lap. “Sorry, Ben,” he mutters penitently. “I didn’t — I don’t know why I always — sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Ben forgives, easy as anything. He shrugs. “It’s Richie.”

Mike looks up from his papers. “Okay, good news and bad news,” he announces. “The good news is that he’s not dying. The bad news is I think I know what happened.”

They all look at him, waiting. Bev bunches the sleeves of her sweater in her palms as she balls her hands up into fists. She doesn’t know who she wants to take a swing at, but it’s definitely somebody.

“I thought his blood would be enough,” Mike tells him, looking somewhat sheepish. “To represent ... this Richie. But it — technically, it was Other Richie’s blood, so — we had two totems, both of Other Richie. Instead of anchoring them both here, it just ... sent him.”

“_Sent_ him?” Eddie repeats, voice cracking. He tightens his grip on Richie’s hair and then soothes it down again. “Sent him _where_?”

Mike looks up from his document. His eyes fall on Richie’s face for a moment before he finally looks at Eddie. “Well,” he says, “if I had to guess, I’d say nineteen eighty-nine.”

-

_twenty-seven years earlier or simultaneously,  
_ _depending on your conception of the nature of time_

Richie blinks at himself. Himself, his real actual body, standing at the foot of his bed, looking furious. 

“Is that really what I look like when I’m mad?” he asks, unable to think of anything else to say. “I look constipated.”

“You _are _constipated!” Old Richie — Young Richie? Young-as-Old Richie? — shouts. “Constipated with stupidity and general suckass!” 

Richie struggles up to his elbows, finding his glasses on the table and adjusting them onto his nose. “Nice burn,” he mutters. “Can you — Jesus Christ, can you stop pacing? You’re giving me a headache.”

“I’m giving _you_ a headache?!” Young/Old Richie snaps. “This whole body is just like, one big sweaty gross ache monster! Go to a fucking chiropractor, dude, what is wrong with you! Why do you have so much hair on your fucking balls!”

“It hurts to remove!” Richie snaps, defensive. “And I don’t fucking know why it’s sweating, have you tried feeding it a fucking vegetable since you’ve been in it?” 

“Gross,” says Young/Old Richie. “What the fuck.”

Richie buries his face in his hands. “How are you here,” he asks, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes and half opening when he opens them again the other Richie will be gone. “I mean, how did you literally get here?”

Young/Old Richie — no. He’s got to think of a better name; that was going to hurt his head. He’ll just. He’ll just call him Young Richie. That will be fine.

“—to bed and then woke up inside of fucking Dark Richie, whose life is a fucking _joke_—”

“What did you call me?”

“Dark Richie.” He juts out his chin in defiance or maybe real anger. “Because you live in the fucking dark mirror verse and you’re an asshole.”

Richie hears himself laugh, a kind of hysterical sound very disconnected to how he’s actually feeling, which is like all the oxygen has gone out of his room. Here he is, Richie thinks: here he is, the version of him that got everything so wrong; that made shitty, selfish decisions; that abandoned his mom and forgot his dad and never told Eddie that he loved him, never, not once.

And he thinks _Richie_ is the asshole?

“Oh my God, you think I’m like, the _darkest timeline_?” he asks. “Buddy, whose fault is that?”

“Yours!” he yells. “Why the fuck don’t you have any friends! Why don’t you have dad’s phone number!”

“_Because you ran away from him, _asshole!” Richie yells back, climbing to his feet on the mattress so he can scream at eye-level. Fuck calling him Young Richie, he can be Shithead Richie for all Richie cares. “_You _fucked off when Mom got bad, _you_ refused to come out to anybody, _you_ were so fucking scared of anyone knowing anything about your life that you never told jokes about any actual real shit — Jesus, I’ve been feeling so fucking protective of you and now here you are calling me Dark Richie like I’m not_ what you fucking made me._”

Shithead Richie shrinks back, hands coming up automatically to cross his chest, an turtled inverse of Richie’s own flailing limbs. Shithead Richie sits down in the desk chair, hard. He stares at Richie with wide eyes, and — fuck. Is he going to cry? Did Richie make himself _cry_?

“Okay,” he soothes, because watching his adult face crumpled to tears is a level of meta-horrifying that he’s not prepared to deal with at — he glances at his clock — four in the morning. He slowly climbs off the bed, hands out and open as if to prove he doesn’t have any weapons. “Okay. That was — a lot. I forgot you were thirteen, dude. You look old as fuck.”

They are saved from further fighting by the sound of a door closing, and footsteps in the hall. Richie and Sh—and Young Richie look at one another with what he assumes are mostly identical expressions of panic. Young Richie throws himself under the bed as Richie tries unhelpfully to shove him in by his feet. He’s mid-dive under his covers when his door opens and his dad likes his head in, flicking on a light. 

“Hey, bud, what’s going on?” he asks groggily, emerging more fully into the room. “What are you yelling at?”

Richie shakes his head frantically, praying his dad doesn’t make note of the massive adult-sized shoes poking out from under the bed. “Sorry, uh — I had a nightmare.” 

His dad comes to sit on the edge of the bed. “What about?”

“Growing up,” Richie answers, which is as close to the truth as he can get.

His dad chuckles quietly into a yawn, and then reaches out to ruffle Richie’s hair. “It’s not as bad as it seems,” he promises. “I know things might look bleak right now, but you’ve been — really mature, these last few weeks. I can’t tell you how much it has helped having you around, kiddo.”

Richie feels acutely aware of Young Richie listening below him. How did he get here? Did his presence mean that Richie was about to be transported back? Was this — how much more time does he have left, here, with all the people he loves?

“Sometimes it’s — really hard,” he says carefully, trying to say the thing that would maybe keep them on the right path, even without him. “Sometimes I’m really scared that — I’m going to lose everyone. That I’ll become someone else and they’ll forget me.”

His dad runs a hand over his face, shoulders collapsing inward. “Was that you’re dream?” he asks. “That your mom and I forgot you?”

“I dreamed that _everyone_ forgot me,” Richie says. “That I turned into this selfish little shit who never — that I just left everyone behind and — ”

His dad reaches in and pulls Richie into a rough hug. “You’ll have to work pretty hard to leave me behind, because if you go I’m coming after you,” he promises, face buried in Richie’s hair. “Okay? I promise. I’ll always come.”

_But you don’t, _Richie thinks. _I do run and you don’t come after me._

Richie closes his eyes, hands coming up around his dad’s neck. He doesn’t want to go. If Young Richie is this mad, it must mean his life still sucks. It must mean that he hasn’t gotten it right yet. Richie doesn’t want to grow up and be the person he’s been, and he doesn’t want the people he loves to be the people that forgetting made them into.

He’s been — God, it’s so fucked up, but he’s been _so happy _here_._

“But sometimes,” his dad continues, “you have to be a little selfish. Sometimes you have to let people lose you, because losing each other means a chance for growth. It’s okay to grow out of the pot you came in, buddy.”

_Unless growing out of your pot is playing right into the hands of King Clown Bitchwizard, _Richie thinks, but instead of saying that just squeezes his dad once and lets him go. “Thanks, Dad.”

“You’re a good lad, Richie old chap,” says his dad, doing the British voice. He settles Richie back into bed and rustles his hair again. “Pancakes in the morning, okay?”

“Pip pip, cheerio,” Richie answers with a salute.

His dad takes a step back, and Richie realizes in horror that he’s going to put his foot down directly into —

His foot goes right through Young Richie’s enormous shoes, and he moves to the door without seeming to notice anything. Richie stays frozen as the light gets flicked back off, as the footsteps recede. 

“He couldn’t see you,” Richie breathes as Young Richie struggles out from under the bed. “Dude, he literally went _through your leg._”

Young Richie gapes at him. “What the fuck was _that_?” he asks, flapping a hand toward the door. He flicks on the desk lamp. “Are we the fucking Partridge family now?”

Richie flops tiredly back against the pillows. He’s getting a headache again. “You can be mad that I don’t have dad’s phone number or you can be mad that I’m trying to, like, cultivate a little fucking emotional honesty in this house, but you can’t be mad about both, you shit-gibbon.”

Young Richie shifts on his feet, awkward. “Well ... fuck you too,” he mutters, eyes darting around the room, at everywhere but Richie.

Richie sighs. He had somehow managed to forget that at thirteen he’d have preferred to cut his own dick off than have a serious conversation. “Look. How did you get here? For that matter, how did _I_ get here? Where have you been, other than — ”

He blinks, stopping short. “Wait. Have you been living my life? In twenty-sixteen? Please tell me you haven’t been doing anything publicly embarrassing, I have — ”

“It would be extremely hard to make your life more publicly embarrassing than it already is,” Young Richie informs him dismissively. Richie grits his teeth and reminds himself it’s unethical to punch children, even really irritating ones. “And no. I didn’t do anything except give a fucking amazing standup performance — an _original _performance, I _might _add — and call Stan. Oh, and I made out with some guy named Jason but he wouldn’t sleep with me because he thinks we are a gay sex virgin.”

“You _are_ a gay sex virgin,” Richie points out. “And I’m not sure that a couple of deeply self-loathing experiences in — wait, did you say you called _Stan_?”

Young Richie blinks at him. “Yeah, obviously. Who else was I gonna call? He didn’t remember us at first, but don’t worry, I fixed him. I fixed everybody, actually, so. You’re welcome, asshole.”

“But — Stan’s dead,” Richie says. His lips feel kind of numb suddenly. How could — if they switched places, how could Stan be — ?

Young Richie frowns. “I think the guy who power-cleaned your apartment this morning is gonna be very surprised to learn that he’s dead,” he says. 

Richie watches his hand reach out to grip Young Richie’s wrist. “You saw him? You saw Stan?”

“Yeah, he came to stay when he found out we were all ...” He makes a loopy gesture around his temple. “Then we brought in everyone else because we figured probably that clown-faced fucker was behind everything.”

Richie’s knuckles go white around Young Richie’s arm. “And Eddie?” he asks, barely able to force the words out. “Eddie was there? Eddie came? Eddie is —” 

_Alive?_

Young Richie wrenches his arm away, rubbing at the red mark Richie’s grip made. “Dude, _ow,” _he grumbles, “_Yes_, Eddie came. He ate like half my pizza even though he had his own.” He flashes a grin. “He’s still so short. I didn’t get the chance to make fun of him about it but he like barely comes up to our chin, how fucking funny is —”

“That’s not my timeline,” Richie interrupts, because if he wants to hear himself moon over Edward Kaspbrak he can just listen to his own head and he doesn’t want to know that somewhere out there is a grown-up Richie lucky enough to have held on to what Richie himself lost.

“Yes it is,” Young Richie says. “It has to be.”

“No, it doesn’t, because it isn’t. That’s not how things are in my timeline.”

“What, Eddie’s not short?”

“_No, _dickbag, Eddie’s not _alive._”

Young Richie’s eyes go wide. “Yes he _is,_” he insists, voice pitching up into a panic. “He ate my pizza. He — I hugged him, I — it _has_ to be your timeline, because I held a token from your apartment and it sent me here, to you.”

Richie frowns. “A token?” he repeats. 

“Mike found this ritual, and it needed a token from me and a token from you, to switch us back. Only it didn’t do that, clearly.” 

“Mike and his fucking rituals,” Richie groans. “God. why does Derry even _have _an occult section that big?” 

“Eddie _dies_?” Young Richie squeaks. “Eddie and — and Stan? But how could — but, no, that’s not right. We lived. All of us lived. I was _there_.”

Richie scratches his head roughly, even though it doesn’t itch. “Yeah, the first time,” he says grimly. “Not the second. Not after It wakes up.”

“But It hasn’t _woken_ up!” Richie cries. “Mike said, and he’s been monitoring!”

Richie blinks. “What?”

“Mike. He came. They all came, when Stan and I called. He stayed in Derry all this time, for God knows what fucking reason, and he’s been monitoring because it’s been twenty-seven years, almost, nothing has happened. Just normal Derry shit.”

Richie gets out of bed and starts pacing. It helps his brain sometimes, to be doing something, so he can think. “You — you must have gone back too far,” he realizes. “You must be in my timeline, but — but not when I left it.”

Young Richie also begins pacing. 

“But how?” he asks. “If we swapped places, how did I end up not in _the right place_?”

“Do I look like the kind of person who understands multidimensional time travel?” Richie snaps. “Look in the mirror and tell me that guy understands one single thing that has ever happened, ever, in the history of time.”

Young Richie groans and flops back onto the bed. “My head hurts,” he grumbles. “My everything hurts. Being old sucks.”

“I keep meaning to get into yoga,” offers Richie, conciliatory. “Supposedly it helps with all the, you know. Generalized pain and discomfort.”

He sits gingerly next to Young Richie, plucking at the quilt. He doesn’t want to ask but also he — but also. “So, Eddie is — how did he look?”

Young Richie grins moonily up at the ceiling. “Dude, they all got, like, _so_ hot. But Eddie looked cute. Cute, cute, fucking _cute_. He was so, like, tiny, I just wanted to ... I don’t know. Shove him in a locker, but like, out of love. You know?”

Richie laughs, falling backward so that they are shoulder to shoulder. “I know,” he says, grinning.

“He married a _woman,_ though. Like an ugly woman who I swear to _God_ is his mom.”

Richie — hesitates.

Eddie had told him in confidence. Eddie had told _Old Richie_, the one who knew that it was okay, the one who had already gone through every stage of self-loathing and was tired of it. Would he have told young Richie? _Had_ he, the first time around, and Richie just — forgot?

Is it kinder to keep it safe from the version of himself that hadn’t gotten it right? Or was keeping it safe the root of the whole stupid problem?

“Yeah,” he agrees cautiously. “The thing is.” He clears his throat.

He wants to tell himself so badly. He wants to give himself a chance. He wants to give them _both_ a chance, but he _knows_ Young Richie, he knows how far he has to go before he — before —

_I don’t trust you with him, _he thinks sadly at himself.

“The thing is that, uh, when everyone forgot, we kind of got reset to who we were before It, I think,” Richie says finally, to Young Richie’s expectant face. “But. You could tell him. About you.”

Young Richie rolls his eyes. “_You _could tell him about _you_,” he retorts. “_I_ live in nineteen eighty-nine.”

“Yeah, but you could tell him anyway.”

“Dude. He’d — like, hate me. He’d think I was gross. _I_ kind of think I’m gross.”

Richie stands and walks to the window so that Young Richie can’t tell that he is definitely, absolutely going to start crying. He leans his head against the glass, which is cool in Derry’s summer darkness. The sun hasn’t risen yet, but he knows it’s going to.

He tries to find some of his anger from before but finds that it’s dissipated into a fog of grief, for himself and for Young Richie, who doesn’t know yet what life is like. Who has the gall to blame him for his life when it was a life built out of a whole sequence of younger Richies’ joint decisions. 

But not all those young Richies were sprawled on his bed right now. It’s only one of them. Just only the first, who wants love so badly and is so afraid to get it. Who hates himself for wanting it in the first place.

The truth is that neither one of them are entirely to blame for who they became. There isn’t any one Richie that deserves the blame to be put at his feet; it’s all of them, together, one small decision at a time. 

“You’re not,” he tells the window pane over the lump on his throat. It’s the first time he’s — ever said it out loud. “Richie. You’re not gross. You’re not abnormal. It’s ... it’s a net good to love and be loved, man.”

He turns back around to face Young Richie, because he’s an adult and — and there’s a kid, just a kid like any other kid, who needs him to _be_ an adult.

Not looking at him, still glaring at the ceiling, Young Richie mutters, “Yeah but I like girls too. I can just — isn’t it better if ... I could — I could just stick with them.”

“Yeah, you could,” Richie agrees. “I mean, I did. I wasn’t miserable.”

Young Richie sits up, gaping at him. “You weren’t? But your life sucks, dude.”

Richie huffs a laugh. “Sure, but not just because of that, though. Because of a sequence of bad decisions. Maybe if everything else was perfect I could have, like, found a girl and married her and been fine.”

The look on Young Richie’s face melts into something less surprised and more suspicious. “Aren’t you supposed to be trying to PSA me into — like, loving myself or whatever?”

“Oh, bud,” Richie laughs, “you could be the straightest motherfucker in the world and it would do absolutely nothing for your extremely fragile psyche.”

“Gee, thanks,” mutters Young Richie, rubbing his scalp in a rueful gesture that it’s weird to see from an outside perspective. He’s gotta stop doing that, it fucks his hair up. 

“Look, what’s the point of lying to you?” Richie asks speculatively. “You’d just know that I was. All I’m saying is: yes. You could ignore it, if you wanted. It’s just that we both know that you don’t want to.”

Young Richie sucks in a breath, gaze darting away. “But I do want to,” he argues. 

“Hate to break it to you, little dude, but not wanting to do something because it scares you and wanting not to be scared of it in the first place are two really different things.”

“But what_ good_ does it do?” Young Richie asks, voice breaking. “Like what’s the fucking _point_?”

He swallows hard, and Richie goes over to him, standing in front of him and putting both hands on his shoulders, waiting. He had gotten so many things wrong the first time around, but the thing he messed up most was this: that he had spent so long hating the thing that had tried so hard to let him love. 

Eventually, Young Richie looks up to let himself meet Richie’s eyes and Richie says, “The good is that you’re going to love somebody and not wonder if it’s because you chose not to let yourself love somebody else.”

He says, “One day you are going to wake up and you won’t be afraid anymore.”

“The good is that you get to be _happy_,” Richie promises his own face — his real face, his grown up face, him, Richie, and tries to believe it. 

-

His dad makes pancakes and his mom stands behind Richie, toying with his hair. It needs cutting, she keeps saying, but by the way she runs her hands through it Richie thinks she’ll be sad to cut it, for some reason.

Young Richie stands nervously in the corner, wedged into the counter. His parents can’t see or hear him, and in fact keep reaching right through his torso to dump dirty dishes in the sink. Richie tries to just ignore him.

“I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon,” his mom reminds Richie, coming round his chair to take her own seat, accepting a plate of chocolate and banana pancakes from his dad. “But I — your father and I were thinking it might be nice next weekend if we took a little trip, just the three of us. Maybe down to Cape Cod.”

“That would be fun,” Richie agrees, even though he doesn’t know if he’ll still be here. It makes his heart ache a little to think about it, his parents believing that they’re taking one son but getting saddled with another. He leans across the table to kiss his mom’s cheek, because he doesn’t know how many more times he’ll get to. 

His dad brings a pancake plate over to Richie and then takes a seat. “This is so fucking weird,” says Young Richie for the corner, and Richie’s eye twitches from trying so hard not to look at him. “Like. Who_ are_ you people?”

“Do you need any help at the doctor’s?” Richie asks, determinedly ignoring Young Richie as he pushes forward and walks toward the table, waving his hand in front of their mom’s face. 

“Helloooooo,” he sing-songs. “Ground control to Major Tom.”

Their mom gives Richie a soft smile. “No, baby,” she tells him. “You shouldn’t give up your summer. There will be plenty of doctor’s appointments we can pull you out of school for.”

She winks as their dad steals one of her pancakes and shovels it into his mouth. Young Richie tries to shove his head, but his hand goes right through it. Richie stares down at his plate because otherwise he’s going to flinch. He grits his teeth to keep from telling Young Richie to cut it out. “You’ll turn the boy juvenile, Mags,” he protests cheerfully, the words muffled by pancake.

“The boy’s already a juvenile, Wentworth,” Richie’s mom jokes, reaching out to pinch Richie’s cheek. “Look at him. He’s bad to the bone.”

Richie is wearing pajamas with Batman on them and he’s pretty sure he has toothpaste on his chin. He knows he looks like a tit. “You guys aren’t funny,” he grumbles at his plate.

“This is so stupid,” Young Richie marvels, standing between his parents, looking at the three of them. His voice sounds kind of detached, like he’s observing someone else. “Wow. I left you alone for like one day and you already, like—_broke_ them, what the fuck.”

“We’re very funny,” his dad counters blithely over Young Richie’s musings, and reaches across the table to ruffle Richie’s hair.

“DAD,” Young Richie yells. “DAD. DAD. DAD.”

“Okeydokes!” Richie chirps, hopping to his feet. “Well, I — uh. I have to pee, and then — I was going to go see Bill. If that’s okay. If you don’t need me. I’ll be home for dinner.”

His parents smile up at him. Between them, his adult body hunches inward, arms folded over his chest. Richie tries not to roll his eyes. He’s so overdramatic.

He kisses his mom’s cheek and fist bumps his dad (“What the fuck is that? A secret handshake? You have a _secret handshake _with my _dad_?”) and then flees back to his bedroom to get dressed. He activates the losers’ phone tree, calling Bill who calls Stan who calls Ben who calls Mike who calls Eddie who calls Bev, and they all agree to meet at Bill’s, because Bill has a basement and his parents are almost criminally neglectful. 

Young Richie bounces anxiously on the balls of his feet as they wait on the stoop, tugging nervously at his t-shirt. Richie bats his hand away. “_Stop_, you’re gonna stretch it out. I love that shirt.”

“It’s probably not really here,” Young Richie points out. “Given that whatever I am, it’s probably not, like, _actually_ your body.”

“Well stop it anyway,” Richie snaps. “Can you just stand still for like, ten seconds.”

“Not really,” Young Richie reminds him honestly. “I mean I could try but it makes me feel like my bones are dissolving.”

Richie scrubs his forehead. He knows Young Richie is right because it still feels that way when he doesn’t let himself fidget. “Okay,” he acquiesces. “Fine. Whatever.”

The door opens. “Hey Ri...” Bill gapes at Young Richie. “...Uh.”

“Welp! Guess that answers whether they can see me.” Young Richie says cheerfully, clapping once. “Hello Big Bill! It’s me, Real Richie.”

“_Young _Richie.”

“Best Richie.”

“We will work on the nomenclature,” Richie says firmly. “Can we come in?”

Bill is still staring at Young Richie, but he gives his head a clearing shake. “Y-y ... yes,” he manages. “B-but be quiet, my p-p-parents might — ”

“Nah, grownups can’t see me,” says Young Richie, and walks straight through Bill into the hallway behind him. 

Bill jumps, patting his chest as of looking for a wound, and Richie gives his shoulder a comforting pat. “Weird summer, huh?” he offers sympathetically. 

“F-f-ffffffucking_ weird_ _as shit_,” Bill agrees vehemently. “Everyone else is d-downstairs already. Eddie is gonna f-f-f-freak _out._”

Richie laughs, following Bill down the hall and to the basement, calling out hello to his parents as he passes his dad’s office. They don’t get a response.

In the basement, the losers are stood in a circle around Young Richie, taking turns walking through him like it’s magic trick. 

“Look, Goatgoat, I’m _inside you,_” Bev calls to him, waving. He can only see her hand, poking out from Young Richie’s abdomen. 

“Cool! A new thing to have nightmares about,” Richie says flatly. “Beverly, come out of — uh, me, and help me figure out how to ...”

He pauses. _Get rid of him. _That was what he was going to say, help me figure out how to get rid of him. 

But he — but that can’t be what the plan is, can it? Richie can’t send Young Richie back to the future, and force him to live there. He’s a kid. He’s just a stupid kid who —

— _is going to fuck everything here up,_ his mind supplies. Something small and panicked pinpricks his heart: if he leaves, if Young Richie gets to stay, it’s all just. Going to happen again. He’s going to wake up on a plane and all the people he wanted to save will still be dead and all of this will have been for nothing.

“To fix everything,” he settles on saying, into the uncomfortable silence. 

“Give me my body back, Dark Richie,” Young Richie orders. “Your body sucks.”

“I kind of like it,” Eddie says distractedly, and then snaps his mouth shut, eyes going wide. Richie and Young Richie both stare at him as he pinks up, shoulders hunching up toward his ears. “Uh. I mean. It’s kind of ...”

“Cute,” supplies Bev mercifully.

“Cute, cute, cute,” agrees Ben. 

“What are you guys _talking_ about?” asks Stan. “He looks like a muppet.”

“That’s what I said!” Young Richie cries. “Stan the Man. Always the best.”

Richie slumps down into Bill’s couch. His headache is coming back, or maybe never went away. Eddie flips down next to him, arms touching. Young Richie glares at them. 

Mike, who has been quiet until now, says suddenly, “Wait. Richie — uh, old Richie — or, I mean, old body —”

“We are _not _calling me Old Body,” Young Richie says flatly. “I can be Richie, and he can be Shitty Richie.”

“How about I be Richie and _you_ be Fuckhead?” Richie retorts.

“You’re both fuckheads, that’s not useful for classification purposes,” Stan interjects dryly. “How about: Richie,” he points at Richie, “and Richie Prime?” He points at Young Richie. 

Young Richie looks pleased; Richie shrugs. “I’m gonna keep calling him Fuckhead in my mind,” he warns. “But fine, whatever.”

Mike nods placidly. He moves into the living room to sit cross-legged on the coffee table like some weird yogi. “Okay. So, Richie hasn’t been able to tell us anything about the future. When he tries he forgets it. But maybe you can, because you’re — because you belong here and you aren’t a grown up.”

Richie sighs. “It doesn’t matter if he can,” he explains. “He’s not from my future.”

Young Richie rolls his eyes. “Yes I _am,_” he insists. “The ritual used _your shit _and sent me to _you_.”

“Yeah but I am _telling_ you — ”

Mike holds up his hands in a calming gesture. “I have an idea.”

Richie blinks. “Already?” he asks. “He just got here, like, eight seconds ago.”

“And you’ve been here almost three weeks,” Mike reminds him. “I’ve been reading.” 

“Of course you have,” Richie and Young Richie say at the same time, then glare at one another.

Eddie lays a soothing hand on Richie’s arm as Mike addresses Ben, pointedly ignoring them. “Richie, you told me that when you fought It the second time, you got caught in the deadlights, right?”

“Yes,” Richie agrees, wincing. Young Richie looks horrified by this prospect, which is fair enough. Richie shrugs quasi-comfortingly at him.

“What did you see?”

Richie tries to remember. “Not ... really anything. Or — I guess I don’t remember. It was just ... cold. And bright.”

Mike nods, looking thrilled by this answer, which Richie thinks is a little rude given how traumatizing it was for Richie personally. “Right! But when Bev was in the deadlights, she saw something, remember?”

“Our future selves,” Bev agrees. Ben gives her a little smile. 

“Exactly. We thought it was a vision, a projection. But what if it wasn’t?” 

“W-w-what do you mean?” asks Bill.

But Ben’s eyes have widened. “You think she really time traveled.” 

Mike shakes his head. “Not exactly,” he says. “I think she _dimension traveled._”

“But,” Ben says, beginning to pace excited, “that would mean that Richie and Richie Prime didn’t swap places in _time_ ... ”

“They swapped _dimensions_. Which explains why it’s possible that Richie Prime went to a different part of Richie’s timeline than Richie left. Maybe, when It swapped them — ”

“But It is _dead_,” Richie interjects. “So I don’t see how It could have swapped us when we _killed It_.”

Mike and Ben exchange a look that Richie does not care for. Ben comes to sit on Richie’s non-Eddie side and gently pats his arm. “Unless,” he says gently, glancing at Mike as if for confirmation, “you didn’t.”

Richie’s stomach goes cold. 

“But we did,” he insists. “We did. I was there. I — I called it a sloppy bitch and I — ”

_I watched Eddie die,_ he thinks. _Stan and Eddie died so we could kill it so we have to have killed it. We have to have killed it because otherwise Eddie — because otherwise — _

“Hey,” murmurs Eddie, hand coming up to clasp Richie’s. He’s still wearing that cast, the stupid _lover_ cast, and Richie didn’t save him. Richie didn’t even _avenge _him. “Richie. Hey. Breathe.”

He’s not, Richie realizes. He’s not breathing. He can’t. 

“Breathe,” Young Richie commands him, looking panicked. “If you kill that body I’m fucked!”

But Richie feels — outside himself. Outside his body, both bodies; he feels outside all the lives he lived and didn’t live, all the choices made and unmade: none of it matters, he realizes. Nothing he’s ever done has mattered because at the end of the day It is all there is. At the end of the day they’re all fucking clowns.

He feels two hands land heavily on his knees. When he looks up, Stan is crouched in front of him, calm. His yarmulke is a little askew. 

“Match my breathing,” Stan says. “Don’t think about anything else, okay? Just try to match my breathing.”

Richie tries. He watches Stan’s chest expand in and out. He feels Eddie’s hand in his, squeezing on every inhale and releasing on every exhale. He feels Bill’s hand come to rest on his shoulder, then Ben’s head. He sees Mike come to stand behind Stan, good old Mike, steady and calm. Bev crouches down next to Stan and lays her head on Richie’s knee. 

They breathe together, all seven of them. In and out. His lungs expand and fill and empty and expand again. Richie’s heart rate slows to match theirs. Seven bodies and one heart. 

Richie remembers: after It was dead, all of them in the water. He’d loved those versions, too, he thinks; badly broken and limping through life, he’d loved them as much as he loved the kids around him now. He loved them and wanted to save them but he’d never wanted to _change_ them, per se.

Behind Mike, Young Richie is watching them, expression unreadable, even to Richie.

“That’s it,” Stan says gently, grinning. “I’ve been doing those exercises when I feel panicky. It works pretty good most of the time.”

Richie manages a smile. “Thanks guys. Sorry.”

Eddie nudges in closer. “Whatever, loser,” he says, smiling. 

“Do you want to take a break?” Ben asks kindly.

Richie shakes his head and blows out a long breath, squeezing Eddie’s hand. “No. Let’s just—fuck, man, bad news is bad news no matter what time you get it delivered.”

“It’s not all bad,” Mike promises. “Not if I’m right. Because if I’m right, then what happened was It knew we — I mean future us — were going to win, and It thought that — that if It could fuck up the group. If it could make us anything other than exactly what we were, It could win.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?” Eddie asks. 

“It _means_ It swapped Richie here and Richie Prime to the future because It thought that Richie would fuck up the past and Young Richie would fuck up the future.” 

“Cool,” grumbles Young Richie, “so It thinks I’m an incompetent idiot. I can’t even get respect from clowns.”

“But then why make me think we defeated It in my dimension?” Richie points out. “If everything that I remember happening after I got taken by the deadlights was, like — false memory, why pretend to die?”

Mike looks stumped by that, glancing at Ben and then Stan for help. Nobody says anything for a long moment until Young Richie mutters sullenly on a sigh: “Because my biggest fear isn’t getting eaten by It.”

Richie blinks. “I dunno, man, I really, _really_ don’t want to get eaten by, like — fucking — _clown-kin._”

“What’s clown-kin?” Ben asks curiously.

“Oh, Ben buddy, we don’t have time to get into social-sexual deviancy in the early twenty-first century,” Richie tells him. “But the good news is you are so pure of spirit I’ll bet even twenty-sixteen Ben has no idea what I’m talking about.”

“I can’t believe I have to say this in front of everybody,” Young Richie whines, getting them back on track. “Look, _obviously_ I don’t want to be _eaten_. But what’s worse than being eaten? Being Bill.”

Behind Richie, Bill startles. “Hey,” he protests. “W-what the fuck?”

Young Richie waves a dismissive hand, beginning to pace. “Look, no offense Big Bill, but look at what happened to your life after Georgie died. I’m sure it sucked for Georgie — _no_, don’t look at me like that, I’m not being a dick, I’m serious. I know he suffered a lot and that sucks but like, you suffer and then you die, right? And then you’re dead and the suffering stops. But Bill has to live with Georgie being dead. Forever. Bill had to — to know he was dead and he just has to keep knowing that, forever.” 

Bev turns her gaze to Richie, sympathetic, knowing. 

_I remember why I left,_ Richie thinks suddenly. He’s been so busy being mad at his past self for always running that he’d forgotten that there had been reasons why he did. Reasons why he had seen his mom deteriorating and thought _no_. Thought: _if I go now I don’t have to see it. I can pretend not to know._

“We’d rather be dead than the one left alive,” Richie murmurs. “It made me think I was — left behind. So that I’d want to stay here, where everyone was still around. So I wouldn’t try to go back.”

“Then why send Richie Prime to a different point in Richie’s timeline?” Bev asks, furrowing her brow. “Why not make a direct swap?”

“Because Richie Prime wouldn’t know what R-R-Richie knows,” Bill muses. “So when w-we went b-b-back to Derry, It would have a better sh-shot.”

Richie shakes his head. He looks at Stan, still crouched in front of him, listening so intently. He thinks about how keenly he had missed him, the moment he remembered; missed him for the twenty-seven years they were apart and missed him for all the years they’d be apart still. He thinks about It saying _you’re all grown up. _

“It’s not just that,” he realizes. “I think It _missed _us. I think It was mad that Stan didn’t come.” 

Stan blinks. “What?”

“You didn’t come back,” Richie reminds him. “You took yourself off the board, so It didn’t get—so It couldn’t eat you, and it wants to. It doesn’t want to eat one of us, It wants to eat _all_ of us, because ... It loves us, I think, in Its horrible, weird way. It loves us the way butchers love their cows, you know?”

“Wow, I hate that, actually,” announces Bev, wrinkling her nose. “Like ... no thank you at all.”

Stan’s brow furrows. “That was my plan?” he asks Richie, meeting his eyes. “The one you told me about?”

Richie sighs. He’d made up a fake plan for Stan but the truth is — at the end of the day, yes. That _had_, in a roundabout way, been Stan’s plan. To take himself out of the game so they could win it. He just hadn’t understood the real reason it would work. “Parts of your plan worked out, completely by accident,” Richie admits. “So it was still a shitdick plan.”

“So let me get this straight,” Young Richie summarizes. “_This_ motherfucker got stuck in the deadlights in some _other dimension_ that has _nothing to do with me_, which transported him here, to take over my awesome life, while I got stuck in his shitty, other-dimension life, with the sole purpose of ... fucking with Stan?”

Eddie blows out a long breath. He is still holding Richie’s hand, grip tight. “So — you’re _not _Richie,” he diagnoses, grip loosening. Richie doesn’t let him pull away. _Don’t go_, he thinks plaintively. _Not when we’ve come so far._

“I _am_,” he insists. “I —”

“I think maybe the travel split the dimensions,” Mike interjects. “I think our Richie made this Richie, but then — but when Richie came back and Richie Prime went forward to the earlier time point, it created a break which became the new dimension.” 

“My head hurts,” says Young Richie. “None of this makes any sense.”

Only it does, Richie thinks; it makes perfect sense, but only if it was Richie that got sent back. It thought that if he came back here, if he saw them all alive again, alive and young and unbroken again, he’d want to stay. His fear of losing them would outweigh his fear of anything else, and he’d mess it all up because Richie can shrink his fear of clowns, his fear of death, his fear of pain; he can shrink his fear being outed, of being seen; he can shrink his fear of never being loved in the first place, but never his fear of what happens when he loses love he had. Of what happens when he cultivates love and then has nowhere to put it.

And It was right. _Help me figure out how to get rid of him._ It’s what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? To get rid of Young Richie. To be the one who got to stay. 

He’s spent the last couple of weeks so carefully planting seeds to save them, and in the end, if it hadn’t worked ... if, twenty-seven years from now, he had lost any of them again, down in that quarry — 

“Think about it,” Ben explains. “If Richie changed things here, and you changed things there, It could eat us _twice_. In _two_ dimensions.”

“Jesus, how hungry _is_ this motherfucker?” Bev complains. “I mean, damn.”

The only way to save them is to _leave_ them, Richie thinks. The only way to save them is not to try.

“Well,” he says, not looking at anybody, just staring at his young, young hands: “Guess we gotta figure out how to get me back to where I belong.”

“You belong with _us_,” Eddie says from beside him, voice fierce. 

“Wow, _o_kay,” says Young Richie, folding his hands over his chest. “I see where your loyalties lie, Kaspbrak, you — floozy.”

Eddie turns to glare at him. “Oh, you walk around claiming to have banged every mom in this town and _I’m_ the floozy?” he demands. “That’s — that’s — homophobic!” Everyone startles, heads whipping as one to gape at him. Eddie’s eyes widen, and then he juts his chin out, stubborn. “Yeah. It’s homophobic. Fuck you.”

“Seriously,” says Richie, heart aching as he shakes Eddie’s hand off to pinch his cheek. “College is going to be an extremely adventurous time for you, sexually. I’ll bet you get really into crop-tops.”

“Mike sent me here using a ritual he found in the library,” Young Richie interrupts, voice squeaking a little. “So. We could use the same one. To send you back. Or switch us. Or whatever.”

Ben brightens. “A research project!” he cries happily, grabbing Mike and heading toward the door. Behind them, Bev’s eyes wrinkle at the corners. She and Stan follow behind. “I just cleaned off my Derry Murder Board last week so I’ve got room to start a new one.”

“Well, as long as you have room,” snarks Young Richie. He’s still glaring at where Eddie and Richie are holding hands, climbing slowly off the couch. Richie rolls his eyes, but lets go; no need to antagonize himself. 

God, both of them are so fucking _young_, Richie thinks. He’d almost forgotten how agonizing it was to love Eddie at thirteen. How every tiny thing felt catastrophic. It might have been easier, as an adult. If they’d had the chance. If they’d — if he’d been brave enough in time.

It might have felt like comfort, not a battle. 

Young Richie ushers Eddie out of Stan’s basement ahead of them, until it’s only Bill and Richie pulling up the rear. Bill stops at the door, studying Richie’s face with his signature Bill seriousness. With one hand on the handle, he says quietly, “W-we won’t make you leave, R-R-Richie.”

Richie laughs a little. He’s tempted to ruffle Bill’s hair, but resists, out of respect. “I know you wouldn’t,” he assures him. “But I should go anyway.”

“You d-d-d-on’t want to.”

“Buddy, most things that have happened to me in my life were things I didn’t want,” Richie muses.

Bill chuckles, then bites his lip. Richie waits him out; sometimes Bill needs time to think through exactly what he wants to say, so that he can say it without a stutter. So that he can be sure of every word. Eventually he brings a hand up to rub the back of his neck and then asks: “In the future, am I still with Beverly?”

“No,” says Richie, as kindly as he can.

“Are you with Eddie?”

The question startles Richie a little, because _he_ knew they were being obvious but he hadn’t really thought that anyone _else_ knew. In his surprise, he answers honestly: “No. We never were. I was too scared, and then we all forgot, and when I remembered I was too scared all over again.”

“Of what?”

“Losing him, I guess.”

Bill frowns. “But you — b-b-but you lost him anyway,” he points out. 

“Well, let that be a lesson to us all,” says Richie dryly. “Thanks for reminding me.”

Bill looks sheepishly away, and even though Bill is the one that always felt most like an adult, Richie remembers anew that he isn’t. That this is his first time round, and even though he speaks with authority, most of the time Bill is just ... guessing. Most of the time Bill is just following his gut. Even as an adult, Bill had just been bullshitting his way through on the basis of trying to do what was right, as best as he could guess it.

“The thing is, Bill,” he says, “I would honestly be a lot more gentle and roundabout about this, but it has recently become clear to me that I don’t have the luxury of time, so I’m just gonna say it: probably you should love someone for their personality, not because you think you can keep them from being eaten by a clown.”

Blinking at him, Bill says, “I love Bev.”

“Yeah, we all love Bev. But _you_ want to pluck Bev from the den of iniquity that is her home life because you think she’s like, pure and delicate or whatever, when actually she’s just a person.”

Eddie’s head pokes around the corner. He’s glaring at them, as always. “What are you two doing?” he squeaks. “Come _on._ We’re _going_ to the _library_.”

Young Richie’s head pops through his chest, grinning ghoulishly. “Yeah, stop making out and lets get moving.”

“Y-y-you wish we were mmmmm....aking out,” Bill returns, grinning a little, glancing at Richie as if for approval. “You’re n-not my type.”

“Bill only likes sad twinks with anxiety,” Richie agrees, and then laughs at his own joke because none of them know what a twink is, and they don’t get it.

-

They leave Ben and Mike to their research after Bev and both Richies are told unequivocally that they are “not being helpful.” Dark Richie seems to take this in stride, but Richie and Bev give vehement protest until Bill and Stan escort them from the library and even give them extra tokens for the arcade. Eddie comes despite not being kicked out because at the end of the day Eddie is always going to heed the call of fun over the call of work.

“But I can’t _play_,” Young Richie whines. “My hand is just gonna go right through the controls.”

Dark Richie gives him a thoughtful look, looping an arm around Bev’s shoulders. On his other side, Eddie is standing close enough that Dark Richie has to be careful to avoid elbowing him.

He’s so — _tactile _with them. With all of them. Eddie’s eyes keep darting toward Richie but he’s _glued _to Dark Richie. Even Bev — _Bev_, the toughest of any of them — keeps reaching out to touch and be touched.

They watch Dark Richie for _approval_, almost. They want him to _like _them. Richie knows they, like, love him, or whatever, but it’s not like he doesn’t _know _that he’s a shit. That he’s a trash mouth. Being loved and being liked are different. You tolerate what you don’t like in the things you love, and Richie always kind of assumed the thing they didn’t like was his personality. 

And yet here they all are. Breathing with Dark Richie on the couch. Hanging off his shoulders. No one has called him Trashmouth once. 

Richie thinks about this morning, his parents, laughing and happy and talking about a vacation in Cape Cod. _You’ve been really mature these last weeks. _When Richie left, his dad was forgetting his fucking _name_, and now —

They like Dark Richie _better. _

“—rd that I can touch you but no one else can,” Dark Eddie is musing. “Look.” He shakes free of the losers and gives Richie a light shove. “What’s that about?”

“Probably like, two Richies can’t occupy the same space at the same time,” Bev says. “The world would explode.”

“The whole _dimension_ would explode,” Eddie amends. He grins at Dark Richie, jostling him. _You belong with us, _he’d said. 

Bev grins. “True. Listen, I don’t know science but I have an idea.”

“Thank you for your honesty regarding your scientific qualifications, Goatgoat,” says Dark Richie, as they arrive at the arcade. He holds the door open for Bev and Eddie to pass through.

“What the fuck is a Goatgoat?” Richie asks, walking right through the door and looking to Eddie for help. Eddie just shrugs, holding up his hands in a gesture clearly meant to suggest that he can’t be held responsible for Bev and Dark Richie’s weird shit. 

They exchange a glance. “Long story,” Bev says eventually, giggling. 

_Great,_ Richie thinks, _they have inside jokes._ Dark Richie invaded his fucking life and how he has inside fucking jokes with all of Richie’s fucking friends. Maybe he _does_ belong with them. Maybe it would be better for all of them if he just stayed here, and Richie went back to the future.

“Anyway,” Bev is saying, “my idea is this: if you guys are touching, maybe Richie Prime can touch stuff.”

Dark Richie had said it last night, and Richie hadn’t wanted to hear it. But — he was right, wasn’t he? It _is_ Richie who makes all the terrible decisions that lead to Dark Richie. It’s him, regular Richie, young Richie, _stupid_ Richie. He makes all these terrible decisions and then traps them both in that awful life where, apparently, Stan and Eddie are both doomed to die.

Bev holds out a coin. She is smiling. 

In the future, Stan loves Richie best because he’s never met Dark Richie. They all like Richie best there. They have to. There isn’t one else. Richie doesn’t have to be responsible for living up to him. Richie doesn’t have to live up to anybody. Richie barely has to try to be better than the life this asshole has made for himself out of the garbage Richie will apparently leave for him.

Dark Richie holds out his hand. Richie looks at it, and then at Eddie, then Bev. They’re all looking at him. Perhaps the best way to guard them would be to give them away to someone who knows better. To someone who knows all the mistakes that Richie hasn’t made yet. Richie could do that. Richie could do it, if he had to. 

_Who will take care of you?_ he thinks at them. _Who if not me?_

“I don’t want to play arcade games,” he says, squeezing his hand into a fist. “You guys go ahead without me.” 

He passes through the door as he leaves them, intangible as a ghost.

-

Richie goes to the hospital. He wanders through the rooms until he finds his parents, sitting together in one of the special waiting rooms upstairs. His dad is reading a _Highligbts_ magazine, which is for children. His mom keeps tapping her foot. She’s a fidgeter, too. She’s the only one who never got annoyed with Richie about it.

“Sorry for the hold up,” a nurse tells them. “Doctor Tripp will be with you in just a second.” 

His mom smiles blandly. “That’s fine,” she assures the nurse, but Richie knows by the set of her jaw they it isn’t fine. That she wants to get through the appointment and get out. Go home.

His dad knows too. He puts down the magazine and takes her hand. “Mags,” he murmurs. “You okay?”

“Well, I’m dying, but otherwise I’m peachy,” she snaps, and then sighs, giving his hand a squeeze. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

Richie’s dad shakes his head. “You’re not dying,” he corrects gently. “Whatever happens, I’m here, Richie is here. Even when you don’t remember, we’ll still be here.”

He sits down in front of them. Dimly he is aware that he’s crying. He tries to put his head on his mother’s knee but it goes through. He can’t touch her or be touched by her.

Isn’t that how it will be, anyway? When she’s — gone full crazy? When she doesn’t remember him? Even if he touches her then. Even if. It won’t be her. It will be some approximation of her. 

His mom sniffs. She looks down at her lap. “Oh, but you shouldn’t be, he shouldn’t be,” she scolds, voice wobbling. After a pause, she meets Richie’s dad’s eyes and says: “Wentworth. Promise me. When it gets bad, you’ll send him away. I don’t want him to see. I want him to remember me exactly as I am.”

“Maggie,” Richie’s dad says. His voice sounds like there is a lake in it. So many things Richie can’t hear or see beneath the letters of his mom’s name.

Richie wants to go back to the dark future, where he won’t have to see it. Where he can pretend that his mom is just like she is now. Funny and fidgety and sometimes absent-minded, hands soft and eyes warm when she looks at him. In the future he doesn’t have to do anything other than pretend she lives in Maine and loves him from the distance that he made.

“College,” she says. “Or — or whatever it is that he wants. Maybe not college, admittedly.”

His dad laughs. Richie laughs a little, too. 

“I’m okay,” Richie tells them, though he knows they can’t hear him. “My life ends up bad but it’s not — _bad_, bad. Just normal bad, you know? And I can fix it. I can. Dark Richie can take care of you, and I can take care of me.”

His mom brings a hand up to run through her hair. “He’s so young,” she murmurs. “What’s going to happen to him, when I’m gone? Who will teach him how to — to make hospital corners with his sheets? And separate his laundry? Who will teach him — ”

“Me,” his dad says softly. “Mags. Me. I will.”

“Wentworth, you know you’re terrible at folding the sheets,” his mother scolds, but she’s smiling a wobbly smile. She sniffs again. “Only — I _don’t _want him to see me, once it’s — once I’m that far gone. Please. Promise.”

His dad is quiet.

_You ran away from him, _Richie remembers Dark Richie saying. _You fucked off when Mom got bad._

“I promise,” his dad says. “But I think you aren’t giving him enough credit.”

Richie sucks in a breath.

“It’s going to get so ugly,” his mother muses tiredly, leaning back against the chair and closing her eyes. She looks old, Richie thinks. She looks as old as Richie’s body feels. “And he hides it but he’s so sensitive.”

_You ran away. You fucked off._

“He loves you,” Richie’s dad says. “He’s resilient. And stubborn.”

_You fucked off._

But had he?

Had Richie fucked off, or had he been sent away and not realized it? 

“He’s a child, Went. He doesn’t always get a say.”

Dark Richie thinks he knows, but actually he just _remembers._ That’s different. That’s not the same. If he thinks Richie’s judgment was so bad, why does he trust his memories of the judgments he made, when it’s Richie who made and remembers them? Memories are just stories that you tell yourself, aren't they? That's what makes them so vivid: the telling of them. Dark Richie has been telling himself the story that he left because he chose to, but maybe that's all it is. A story that made it easier for him to understand. 

Richie closes his eyes. He wants to go. He wants to stay. He has always wanted everything so badly. Sometimes it bubbles up in him like this unstoppable wave, a wanting so big it hurts inside his chest. 

_One day you’re going to wake up and not be afraid anymore, _Richie thinks, and it’s a promise Dark Richie had made to him but to himself, too. They both were. They _both _were.

Richie looks at his mom and dad, holding hands in this waiting room, in all the waiting rooms; what was this illness except a waiting room where all of them sat, knowing bad news was coming, and could not leave? 

He lowers his head to his knees and leans in close to his mom’s leg. She can’t feel him, but that’s okay. He’s there.

He sits and waits.

-

It’s Eddie who finds him. He’s waiting outside of the hospital on his bike when Richie emerges, trailing his mom and dad. 

“Young Mr. Kaspbrak,” says Richie’s dad, looking surprised. “Is everything all right?”

“Peachy keen, Mr. T,” says Eddie cheerfully, like a fucking liar. “Just had a check-up for my asthma.”

“And how did it go?”

“Still asthmatic,” Eddie confirms. Richie’s dad laughs and his mom gives Eddie a big, fond smile, reaching out to mess up his hair. 

Richie hangs back as his parents go to the car, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “How’d you know where to find me?” he asks. “I didn’t tell anybody about — oh. Old Richie Loose Lips.”

Eddie shakes his head. “No,” he denies. “He didn’t tell me. I already knew, before he even got here.”

Richie frowns. “What? No you didn’t.”

“Uh, yes I did,” Eddie corrects, sounding affronted. “Don’t tell me what I know and don’t know, asshole.” 

“How could you know?”

Eddie sighs. He looks down at where his hands at resting on his bike handles and squeezes the brake a few times, speculatively. Eventually he seems to come to a decision. “Because I pay attention to you,” he confesses. “All the time. You’ve been so — the last half a year or so, you’ve been so weird about not wanting to be at home. And then I saw your folks in the hospital during one of my real check-ups. I heard them talking.”

Richie blinks, trying to parse his own thoughts. There was a lot of important information in there, but his brain can’t let go of: “You pay attention to me?” 

Eddie shrugs. “Yeah.”

“Oh,” says Richie faintly. He can feel himself blushing, and his hands goes up automatically to the back of his neck. Eddie won’t look at him. “I, uh. I pay attention to you, too.”

Eddie glances up, cheeks bright red. “I know,” he says smugly, grinning like this is some kind of moral fucking victory. Whatever, Richie will let him have it. “I went to the kissing bridge.” 

Richie feels like he has mental whiplash. “Uh,” he manages, trying to sound casual and not like he wants to find whoever Eddie took to the kissing bridge and turn them into a throw rug. 

“A few days ago. I went with Ben.”

To be fair, Richie could not have predicted that if he’d been given only one option to choose from.

“Why did you go to the kissing bridge with Ben?!” Richie splutters. “No _way_ does that motherfucker get to be both hot _and_ bisexual that is absolutely fucking unf—”

“He wanted to carve his and Bev’s initials and he didn’t want to tell anybody because of how, you know, Bill. Anyway, that’s not the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is someone with your handwriting carved R+E, dumbass.” 

Richie’s throat goes dry. “Oh,” he mutters. “Well.”

“It looks good,” Eddie compliments grudgingly. “The spine of the E was really straight.”

It’s such a stupid compliment, but Richie beams anyway. “Well I’m a master fucking carver,” he says.

Eddie snorts. “Okay, it was two letters, not the Mona Lisa,” he ribs. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“I’ll Mona _your_ Lisa,” Richie returns nonsensically, and is rewarded with the best sound in the world: Eddie’s stupid laugh.

-

Richie goes back to the library. Mike is the only one still there, practicing his reading; Ben, Stan and Bill have gone back to Bill’s to set up. Bev leaves Richie at the library and goes to help them.

Eddie had left without needing help guessing where Young Richie was, which was good because Richie hadn’t been able to guess himself. 

“Hey man,” greets Mike.

He’s surrounded by books. Mike is happiest when he’s surrounded by books. “You—” Richie’s throat tightens and he fights a cough through to clear it. “Mike, man. You should go to college. You should do what you want to do.”

Mike smiles at him. “Not much money in moral philosophy,” he points out.

“Not much money in clown hunting, but you do _that_ anyway,” Richie returns. He takes a seat, cross-legged across from Mike on the floor. “Mike, you’re a good person. Can you give me some good person advice?”

Mike puts the book down. “Uh,” he says. “Maybe?”

Richie nods, picking at the carpet. “What if I don’t want to go?” 

For a long time there’s no answer, but when Richie risks a glance up, Mike doesn’t look horrified; he’s staring off into the distance, thinking. 

“I guess ... you don’t have to,” he decides after a while. “We could find a different ritual so you both can stay. You have to give Richie Prime his body back, though.”

Richie chuckles. “Yeah,” he sighs. “I figured. Not sure I want to be the forty-year-old dude whose best friends are a bunch of pre-teens.”

“I think I figured out why we all left Derry,” Mike offers, as if it explains anything. “I think that as long as we are all together, It can’t wake up. I think It makes us forget each other because even if we were apart, the bond of the losers club would be too strong. We wouldn’t be here but we’d still always be together.”

Richie tilts his head, not understanding what Mike is getting at.

“You could be here or you could be in your own time but you’re still a loser,” Mike explains gently. “You’re my friend, Richie. Here and now, then and there. That doesn’t change.”

Richie closes his eyes. He’d thought that if he only made them happy, if he only got them out without scars. But maybe that wasn’t possible, no matter how well he loved them. Maybe Richie didn’t get to choose what mistakes they make, because they’re kids now but they won’t always be, and in the end it’s the mistakes that shape you.

Young Richie won’t grow up to be Richie as he is;Richie doesn’t know who he’ll be.

He wants to find out. He wants them all to find out. 

Maybe love has never been about how much you give, but how much you’re willing to let yourself accept. 

“You’re my friend too,” he says. “Mike, you’re a really, really, really good friend.”

Mike smiles at him. He says with such infinite kindness, “Thanks. You guys are the ones who taught me how.”

-

When Eddie returns, bringing Young Richie with him back to Bill’s basement, Richie has the sense that something has changed. Something fundamental. He doesn’t know what it is, or why it seems suddenly like he’s been dislodged from the trench he’d dug for himself here, but watching the two of them studiously not look at one another, cheeks pink, gestures giddy, he thinks suddenly: _they’re kids._

They’re kids, and Richie — is not.

It has been so easy to forget, in this body, in this summer of this year. But Richie has wounds that Young Richie doesn’t have yet. He’s felt patient with Eddie’s affections, pleased and amused and waiting for them to mature. 

But Young Richie likes them as they are. Young Richie is _delighted_. 

Richie feels old. Richie _is _old.

Bev nudges him. “I’m gonna miss you, Goatgoat,” she murmurs. 

He smiles at her, reaching out to tug on her ponytail. She_ will_ miss him, he thinks; they’ll all miss him, a little, but not a lot, and not for long. Why should they, when they have him? Exactly him. 

Richie wants to have them, too, but — but he thinks of Young Richie talking about grown-up Stan. About grown-up Eddie. Richie wants to meet Stan, the Stan that would have been his Stan, if he’d have had the chance. The Stan who had learned to life without Richie, who Richie had learned to live without, but doesn’t have to anymore.

Richie wants all of them, grown up and broken the same way that Richie was. He wants these versions to have a better shot but he wants to meet the ones that didn’t, too.

He doesn’t want to go but he wants to be there. He wants both at once. Thirteen and forty. Both. Neither.

“Are you ready?” Mike asks. He glances at Richie. “Uh ... does anyone want to ... say anything?”

Richie tightens his fist around the piece of paper in his hand. He wants Young Richie to find it, when he wakes up in his own body. He wants it to be the first thing he sees. Richie has spent two weeks thinking about water and Gatorade. He’s been thinking that saving everyone meant steering their lives differently, but maybe it didn’t. Maybe it meant only steering his own. Richie can’t drive seven cars at once.

“It was good to see you guys again,” he manages around the lump in his throat. “I’m really glad. That I did.”

The losers move in around him, an all-encompassing hug. Richie looks over their heads at Young Richie, who is watching them. He looks proud. He looks defiant. He looks like he’s going to get everything exactly right, this time, because — how had it taken Richie so long to see it? — there is no “getting it wrong.” There is no life lived incorrectly, because life is generated as you live it, _by_ living it. Every day that you wake up, you’ve succeeded. 

There aren’t wrong choices. Only choices. All you have to do to live life right is to keep living it.

Young Richie takes off Richie’s glasses, the ones he’d brought back in time — across the dimensions? — with him. They open their palms and Bill cuts solemn lines across all their palms. When he gets to Young Richie, Richie reaches out to take his hand. When they touch, Richie thinks he can see his older body solidifying, becoming more real. Bill reaches out, holding his breath, and touches down with the knife.

It makes contact. Beneath the blade, a red line appears on Young Richie’s palm. Anchored enough in 1989 to be real. To bleed. To carry Richie home.

“I don’t know when you’ll wake up,” Mike warns Richie before he begins to read. “It might be a direct swap, but it might not be. It wasn’t the first time.”

“What you’re saying is I could wake up from the deadlights,” Richie surmises. “Rather than in my nice cozy living room that Theodore had decorated professionally.”

From the circle, Eddie says, “Wait, you _do_ have a roommate named Ted?!”

“Start the ritual, Mike,” says Richie, rolling his eyes. “I’m ready.”

“Be ready to fight,” Bev tells him as Mike begins to read, eyes fierce. “When you wake up, be ready.”

Something roils in his stomach. Young Richie squeezes his hand, looking queasy. Richie grips tight and meets his eyes. He can feel something tugging at him, something painful, like a hook. Something that wants to yank him away and yet doesn’t want him to go. Richie looks at his face, his own face worn by his young, young, young, young soul and he tries to think of what to say. What final words to give him. If there was one thing. If there was only one thing that he had wished he had known.

“I’m going to love you one day,” he promises himself. “I promise.”

Young Richie smiles at him. His eyes wrinkle. “You sappy fuck,” he says, voice wobbling. “Don’t you know that you already do?”

And then every t h i n g g o e s — 

-

Richie wakes up in Bill’s basement. Stan’s head is on his calf. Bev’s hands are tangled in his hair. Eddie is curled up against him in a tight ball, like a bitter cat. Ben and Mike are snuggled together against the couch, and Bill somehow managed to fall into the recliner like everybody’s dad after Thanksgiving. 

He’s back in his own body. His small, lanky, half-blind, stupid, terrible, wonderful body that doesn’t have hair on his shoulders and isn’t sweaty behind the knees. His body without an ache in its back. His body, his t-shirt, his shoes, his hands, himself, him_self._

Dark Richie is gone.

In Richie’s hand is folded up piece of paper. On one side, in Richie’s own tiny handwriting, is written:

_hey, Richie Prime. i don’t have a lot of time, but i wanted to make sure you had some kind of, idk, souvenir. so that you’d know in the future that you weren’t crazy, and to help keep everything straight. i don’t know how much of me you’ll remember. i don’t know how much of me I’LL remember, assuming ... well, assuming it works. if i could give you only one piece of advice it would be this: when things get really fucking hard, dig your heels in, don’t turn and run. trust your friends. trust that they love you. trust that they like you. trust that it’s better to lose with them than win without them._

_stuff can be ... really bad. but stick it out anyway. some of it never gets better, but lots of other things do. it’s a fucked up, weird world, buddy, but i think we can be really happy in it, if we try. _

_you’re going to leave each other. you’re going to have to. it’s the only way to wake pennywise up, and you have to wake him up, because you’re the only ones strong enough to defeat him. when they leave, they’ll forget, but you have to love them anyway. don’t be afraid of it this time. _

_don’t be afraid of any of it. _

_at its root, fear is just the dread of losing something, and after all being a loser means that you have nothing left to lose. _

_so good luck, loser. _

_dark richie_


	6. (i'm not the type to throw it all away)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _twenty-seven years later_  
(if you’re counting up from 1989)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🎶looks like we made it, look how far we've come my babaaayyyy🎶

_twenty-seven years later  
_ _(if you’re counting up from 1989)_

A week before, Adrian Mellon is murdered in the water beneath the kissing bridge. Richie hears about it in the café off main street, where his waitress is talking to Greta Bowie as she sets down her pancakes. He freezes, looks up at their oddly detached expressions, and knows. 

“Rise and shine, King Clown Bitchwizard,” he says into his coffee, hands suddenly cold. He squeezes them into fists a few times to restart the circulation. 

“What was that?” Greta snaps at him, tossing her blonde hair back.

Richie blinks at her, slowly and deliberately, then turns to the waitress and says, “Could I get the check?”

“Fine, ignore me,” Greta mutters. “You think you’re better than me because you have some stupid fucking podcast nobody listens to. Maybe you’ll be next, radio boy. We all know what you are.”

Richie puts his phone away. “Your husband certainly knows what I am,” he tells her. “He says your technique could use some work, by the way. Hot tip from me to you: really try to minimize how much teeth you use. It’s a dick, not a corndog.”

The waitress snorts, then covers her mouth with her hand when Greta glares at her. Richie drops five dollars onto the table. “Tell you what, keep the change,” he tells the waitress. “Bye, Greta. As always it’s been a truly and extraordinarily exciting time talking to you. Remember my advice.” He snaps his teeth cheerfully at her and exits the café, tucking his hands into his pockets as he jogs to his car. 

Richie takes a deep breath, then blows it out on a long count of four, pressing his forehead against the steering wheel. He chews his thumbnail. It doesn’t feel good. It hurts a lot, actually, because Richie inevitably goes too far and makes himself bleed. But it’s something to do. Richie is trying this new thing where he goes to a therapist and also listens to that therapist when she tells him things like _did you know you don’t always have to do every impulse that comes into your head?_

It sounds like a boring existence but Richie has spent the last year trying to cultivate some fucking zen. He meditates now. Well, he sits on a yoga mat and counts how many times he can bounce his knee in one minute and the rewards himself with a Snickers but that’s probably as close to meditating as Richie is ever gonna fucking get, so.

Anyway, Richie chews his nail and breathes in on a four count, then out on a four count. When he’s calmer, he drives out to the kissing bridge and ducks under the crime scene tape to stand at the rail. 

Adrian Mellon had asthma, Richie is pretty sure. He was little. He laughed really loudly in public spaces and then looked sheepish about it. He looks down into the water and tries to imagine Adrian there, scared and alone. 

_I’m not scared of you this time, _Richie thinks. He’s spent twenty-seven years exorcising his demons. There’s nothing scary left about a hungry clown except its teeth, and Richie plans to make him choke on those.

“Hey, fucker,” Richie says to the water, “I know it was you.”

There’s no answer but for the water, which rushes blindly beneath him, sweeping all the blood away.

-

Three days before, Richie records a special episode of his podcast and schedules it to go out in two weeks’ time. 

“I’ve been thinking a lot this week about time travel,” he says, “maybe because I’m, like, old as fuck now. I am. I’m almost _forty. _I always knew I would make it exactly this far but I will be honest, the future is a total fucking crapshoot. So it has me thinking, you know? If you could go back in time and tell your younger self something, what would it be? What would you say? Because I think I know. I think I would say: stop itching your dick in public. You think you’re being subtle but absolutely nobody believes that you’re just rummaging around in your pocket. If anything, they probably think you’re masturbating.”

He pauses. “Actually, they _definitely_ think you’re masturbating.”

He leans back in his chair, away from the microphone, and blinks up at the ceiling while he thinks. “I’d also say: if you see me, it means we made it. It means we were brave and did all the hard things we thought we might be too chickenshit to do. It means we got the future we wanted, but if you don’t see me, if you see someone else, that future could be okay, too. Any future can be a good future if you’re stubborn enough.”

Downstairs, the front door opens. His dad is home. Richie wraps by saying: “If I went back in time I’d say: hey, shithead. I love you.”

-

The day before, Richie goes to see his mom. He doesn’t always. It’s hard. He misses her, and anyway it’s not like it’s _her_. It’s just a little stone, but neat and well-tended. His dad visits three times a week and always brings fresh flowers. It snows a lot in Derry in the winter, but Richie’s mom always has daisies on her grave. 

His dad is already there, because he doesn’t like when Richie drives him places. He says it’s because he likes to maintain his sense of independence but Richie is pretty sure it’s because he thinks Richie is a bad driver. 

To be fair, Richie is a bad driver.

“You’re nervous,” his dad diagnoses when Richie moves up next to him, bumping their shoulders. He doesn’t know whether his dad talks to his mom when Richie isn’t with him; he imagines he does. When it’s both of them they mostly talk to each other while staring at her name, everything made easier to say by pretending she is there to mediate it. 

Richie shrugs. “I’m not exactly nervous,” he says. “I think it’s more, like — it feels like something big is about to happen. Something I’ve been waiting a really long time for, but it’s going to be hard, and scary, and I want it done but I don’t want to do it.” 

His dad turns to look at him curiously. He’s gone gray around the edges, but he still has a young face, only a little more lined than when Richie was a kid. They don’t look much alike; Richie takes after his mom. But like, a stupider, more muppet-y version.

“Is this about the terrible tragedy with the Mellon boy last week?” he asks.

Richie feels his face twist. He hunches his shoulders. “You know why they killed him,” he reminds his dad, even though of course his dad only knows half of why they killed him. He only knows the human reason, which, of the two, is worse. At least Pennywise is only ever hungry. He’s a dumpster-diving bitchwizard but at least he’s not a fucking homophobe about it.

“I know why they killed him,” Richie’s dad agrees. “But people kill people for lots of stupid reasons. That’s just the one they picked.”

“That’s true enough,” Richie relents. After a moment’s hesitation, he adds, “Mom would have been happy. I think. About — in high school, when Eddie and I were ... she always liked him best.”

“After Stan,” his dad corrects, and Richie rolls his eyes, waving a dismissive hand.

“Fucking _obviously_, after Stan,” he acknowledges.

His dad hums. He reaches out to put a hand on Richie’s shoulder. “She would have been happy,” he agrees. “Not just about Eddie. About you. She’d have been really proud, Rich. She _was_ really proud.”

“She thought I was Marty the Pervert for a while at the end,” Richie points out dryly, but he does it with a smile, so his dad knows he doesn’t mean it. 

“Marty the Pervert was handsome,” his dad jokes. “He’d have gone far if it weren’t for his personality.”

“The fatal flaw of all us Toziers,” Richie agrees. 

His dad chuckles as falls back into silence, looking at the grave. “We did okay in the end, didn’t we?” he asks after a moment, turning to look at Richie full-on. “I know we had some rough times. But we made it through.”

“Like when you said podcasts were a ‘waste of time’ and now we co-host an iTunes-topping family internet radio show?”

“Son. It’s been five years. You gotta let that one go.”

“Me? Let something go? Father, to whomst are you speaking?”

His dad laughs, but the look he gives Richie after is serious, so Richie smiles at him. “Wentworth, my dear fellow,” he says, doing his worst British accent, “I think we made a jolly good show of it, actually.”

“I was worried when you decided not to go to college,” his dad admits, as if that were some kind of secret and not the most patently obvious emotion his father had ever broadcasted across the dining room table every night for five years. “You always hated Derry and then to decide to stay, I thought — ”

“I stayed because I wanted to stay,” he promises. “With mom, and with you.” 

Richie stayed because someone had to, and Richie’s parents were the ones worth staying for. Richie stayed because in the end he was the one with the choice, and because he had a note that had seen the pocket liner of every pair of pants he’s ever worn that promised him a life that would be bright and sad and hard and full of love, no matter which choice he made. 

So he stayed, and he lived with his dad and cared for his mom, and made a popular podcast with his dad called _Early Onset_, which started out being about Richie’s mom but gradually became about everything and anything they could think of. He wasn’t as famous as he’d been in the other future. He hasn’t slept with as many women, but he’s _definitely _better at blowjobs than Dark Richie was, and it’s important to take your victories where you can get them. 

“We didn’t want her illness to be your life,” his dad tells him.

“It wasn’t,” Richie answers, surprised. “Did you think that? Dad. It wasn’t.”

“But — ”

“Her illness was a _part_ of my life. But so was — all the good stuff. You and me in the waiting room, doing voiceovers for the TV. Mom’s lucid days, when she’d spend all thirty minutes of remembering me just absolutely roasting my haircut. The podcast. People write in all the time saying how much it helped to hear people who’ve been through it. That’s my life, too.” When his dad opens his mouth, Richie holds up a hand to cut him off. “I know what you’re going to say and the answer is: no, I will not go out with your podiatrist’s son. That dude sucks.”

His dad sighs. “You can’t stay hung up on Eddie Kaspbrak forever,” he scolds gently and Richie smiles.

It is the day before. Summer has come to Derry, and a terrible thing came with it. But something good is coming, too: something that is better than the terrible thing, and will last longer. Richie stayed in Derry to wait for it. 

“Don’t worry, pops,” he says. “I have a feeling the wait is almost over.”

-

The night before, Richie has a dream.

He is riding on the back of a turtle. The turtle moves slowly, with ease; the turtle is in no rush, swimming through time, in the space between dimensions. There are so many of them, like foam on the lip of a wave. They keep multiplying, infinitely. Richie can see himself splitting off into newer and newer versions, saying yes instead of no, no instead of yes, left instead of right.

His haircut never gets any better. Richie’s never seen it from this angle, but now that he has, he thinks his mom was right. He needs a new barber.

“Every action has an opposite,” the turtle tells him. “Every decision creates infinite possibilities of decisions unmade.”

“Wow,” says Richie. “Talking turtle. That’s neat.”

It’s not that the turtle laughs, but the turtle nevertheless gives the impression of laughing. Of having laughed, maybe. 

Richie wonders briefly if this is a dream after all, or if it is real, but then he stops worrying about it. Richie stopped worrying a long time ago about the distinction between real and unreal. Things happen; he experiences them. Whether they were in his head or outside of it doesn’t matter, ultimately. It matters how he felt. It matters how they changed him.

“Yes,” says the turtle, which Richie guesses means it can read his thoughts.

“Are they going to come?” Richie asks it, pushing the flats of his palms gently against the shell. It feels cool against his hand, but it warms him anyway, like touching a radiator whose metal is cool but which is blowing hot hair. 

The turtle doesn’t answer. That’s fair, Richie supposes. He doesn’t need the turtle to tell him; Richie knows the answer. They are going to come. They are all going to come, each one of them, even Stan, because all Stans in all universes come when Richie calls for them. They left because they had to leave, because life is not neat, because it does not run in straight lines. Bill’s parents moved in the tenth grade, and then, senior year, Stan’s dad got a fellowship in Tel Aviv and took the family with him. Ben graduated early and got a writing scholarship to the University of North Carolina. They drove him to the airport, Richie and Mike and Bev and Eddie, all of them squeezed into the car that Richie’s mom hadn’t been able to drive for the last two years. Bev held his hand in the backseat but she didn’t cry when he got onto the plane. Ben said, _guys, listen, I wanted to say,_ and Mike told him, _nah, it’s okay. We know. _

Bev left for Chicago on the last day of their final August. _I won’t forget_, she promised Richie, but of course he knew she would. Of course they all knew she would, like Bill had, and Stan, and even Ben. Mike hadn’t made any promises at all. He’d driven himself across the country, didn’t let anyone go with him, said he wanted the quiet of the drive to think.

_I don’t want to go,_ Eddie had told Richie, hanging around Derry until the last minute, delaying and delaying and delaying until Amtrak told him he’d reached the limit of how many times he could reschedule a ticket without losing the fare. _Richie. Come with me. I don’t want to go._

_Of course you want to go, _Richie had answered. _There’s no reason to stay in Derry._

Eddie had said: _Yes there is. There’s one._

“But only one of us could stay,” Richie explains to the turtle, who already knows. “That was the — that’s how it had to work. Even two of us would have been too strong.”

“Yes,” the turtle agrees.

“But it was cute that he wanted to.”

“Cute, cute, cute,” says the turtle.

Richie lays back. He watches himself in infinite variations. He watches himself choose and choose and choose and then live with the choices. That’s all it is, really; living. You make one choice and then another and you try to be happy. Sometimes you even succeed for a while.

The turtle tells him, “You can ask it.”

Something in Richie’s stomach knows that it is time to wake up. He asks: “Did he make it back? Was he happy?”

The time waves part. Richie can see a bubble. Inside it is a face he knows well, a face he never managed to forget: his own. He is waking up in an apartment in Los Angeles. The sun is not yet up. There is coffee in a pot, waiting for him. There is a second lump in the bed, and it kicks him. The lump wants coffee. The lump is demanding it. Dark Richie looks down at the lump and presses a kiss to it, laughing, saying something that Richie cannot hear. The lump reaches its hand up and flicks him off. 

“Yes,” says the turtle.

“Am I going to be happy?”

The turtle doesn’t laugh, but it gives the impression of laughing. “Choose and choose and choose,” says the turtle, and Richie wakes up.

-

The morning of, Richie picks up the phone. He dials the number that he’s known the whole time, the number he memorized with the force of not dialing it. He holds the phone to his ear and he waits and waits and waits and then a voice barks at him, “Who is this? Every day I get calls. Every fucking day I get calls from you fucking spam artist assholes — ”

“Hey Eddie,” Richie interrupts, mouth stretched wide into a smile. “It’s Richie.”

There’s a long pause. Eddie doesn’t remember him, of course. Eddie not remembering him was the whole point. But Richie doesn’t mind, because he will. He will remember. He’ll come back, and he’ll see Richie again, and he’ll remember it all: the kissing bridge, and Mike’s seventeenth birthday, and the night that Richie’s mom wandered off so far she ended up on the side of the interstate. He’ll remember Richie kissing him in the quiet of Stan’s empty house after they’d waved him off, clutching an old yarmulke in his hand. He’ll remember Richie standing at the train station telling him _I’ll love you while you’re gone and I’ll love you when you get back. _

He’ll remember all those things, but he doesn’t now, and even still he goes quiet. Even still, with none of those memories, with nothing tethering him to Richie except the unnamable feeling in his gut that whispers that something is lost in the world that he loves, Eddie goes quiet and mutters, “Oh.”

Eddie says, “Richie ... Tozier? From Derry? The guy who does that podcast?” 

“Yeah,” Richie answers. His heart is full and in his throat. His heart is saying _I still love you_. His heart is saying_ I waited_. His heart is saying _It is time to see you again_. “Richie Tozier, from Derry.”

Eddie won’t remember him for hours yet, but still he laughs a little and says, “Wow. Wow. Richie fucking Tozier. It’s — really good to hear your voice.”

_ the end _

_ . _

_ . _

_ . _

_ . _

_ . _

_ . _

_ . _

_ . _

_ . _

_._

_simultaneously,  
_ _but one dimension to the left_

“WHAT THE FUCK,” Eddie shouts, barreling into Richie’s side hard enough to knock him down and out of the way. “I left you alone for FIVE MINUTES and your ONLY JOB was not to get deadlighted again, you indescribably stupid fuck!”

Richie lands hard on his back, Eddie on top of him. Behind them Richie can see Stan hurling a spear at the horrific spider-shape that It has taken. He is screaming like a crazed hyena. Bev shouts, “FUCK IT UP, WALRUS!” from her piggyback perch on Ben. Richie kind of suspects that her ankle twist wasn’t as bad as she made it seem. Richie kind of suspects she just wants to be carried. 

“Are we gonna keep snuggling or are we gonna kill a clown?” Richie asks Eddie. “Because I’ll be honest, when I imagined our first time it was in a much more sterile environment. Though to be fair that was more for your benefit than mine.”

It’s been only a week since he woke up in his living room, head on Eddie’s lap, losers huddled over him. He’d pushed up onto his elbows, panicking until Stan appeared, kneeling in front of him. 

Stan had looked exactly how Richie imagined him, which is to say incredibly dumb. He’d thrown his arms around Stan’s shoulders and said, “Stan, fuck, _fuck_,” and beneath him Eddie had mumbled, “Well fuck you too, then,” and Richie had laughed and laughed and laughed, glad all at once that he would get the chance to know this version of these losers, with all their bruises and breaks. 

_There is a boy named Adrian Mellon,_ Richie had said. _If we go now we can save him._

In Richie’s peripheral vision, Mike runs past with a stone held high over his head. Richie is pretty sure his strategy is just to, like, chuck it and hope for the best.

Eddie is staring down at him, eyes wide. “Our_ first time_?” he squeaks.

“Are you guys doing this _now_?” asks Bill. “Like ... _right_ now?”

“We’re not doing anything, I’m married,” says Eddie at the same time that Richie says, very calmly, “Bill, I need you to understand that I have been trying to do this for a whole ass week.”

Eddie scrambles to his feet, cheeks red. “To do _what_?” he demands. Behind him, It lets out a terrible scream, drowning out anything Richie might want to say.

In a fit of pique, Eddie whirls around and points a stern finger at It. “Will you SHUT UP PLEASE, you melodramatic, binge-eating, clown-kin piece of _shit_!” he shouts. 

It’s mouth snaps shut. They all turn to stare at Eddie, and It seems to shrink. “I am _trying_ to have an _adult fucking conversation_,” Eddie goes on furiously, gesticulating like a madman and channeling his mother on the top of her fucking game. “And YOU keep interrupting by being a fucking pomeranian or a spider or whatever, so PICK A FURSONA AND FUCKING STICK TO IT, YOU SLOPPY BITCH.”

Richie is like ninety percent sure he has a boner.

He gets to his feet and goes to stand beside Eddie, not even mad that Eddie stole his line. “You ain’t shit, duck. You’re just like your father,” he tells It, mimicking the accent and taking Eddie’s hand. Eddie looks down at where they’re joined and then up at Richie. 

Richie looks back. He doesn’t look away until into the silence It makes a soft, deflating sound. “Look at you,” It says. “All grown up.”

Stan snorts. “Fuck off, circus boy,” he says, and Mike chucks his rock; when it lands, Pennywise seems almost to fold in on Itself, smaller and smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left, and then a blast of energy explodes from the nothingness of that space.

“It’s gonna come down,” says Bill. “We gotta move. _Now._”

Eddie darts forward, dragging Richie behind him. Richie grabs Mike as he passes by, and Mike grabs Stan, and Stan grabs Ben, who is still carrying Bev. The seven of them run in a chain, linked, until they make it out, up into the water. 

The sun is shining. Richie can’t find his glasses, but he’s anchored on either side by someone who loves him and will lead him home. Somewhere in Bangor, his dad doesn’t yet know that Richie is going to find him again. Somewhere in Los Angeles his agent is reading an email that says _i have an idea for an original special, i’m gonna call it “clown fucker.” tell rod thx 4 everything but he’s fired._

Somewhere in Derry, Richie hopes, Adrian Mellon is having a perfectly normal Tuesday. 

“Oh my god we did it,” Ben says. He’s lowered Bev into the water and she is dragging him forward until all seven of them are stacked together, arms and legs and skin, alive. “Wait, Eddie, did you call It a _sloppy bitch_?”

“I definitely heard him say sloppy bitch,” Bill confirms.

“Everybody shut up,” Eddie commands. He whips around to glare at Richie. “It’s your fault! You — this _whole week_, what the fuck is _that_ supposed to — ”

“Oh, that I love you, I’m in love with you,” Richie tells him. It’s so easy. He can’t believe how easy it is.

“What,” says Eddie, blankly. “Oh my god. I remember — _what. _In nineteen ninety-fucking_-four_ I asked if you’d ever — and you said — !”

Richie nods sympathetically. “Yeah, I lied,” he admits cheerfully. “Because you were dating that girl Katy Kettleburn and I didn’t want you to know that I cried about it, like, every night.”

“_What_,” says Eddie, again. 

Stan shakes water out of his hair. “The Kaspbrak machine is out of order,” he says flatly. 

Eddie whirls on him. “Did you know about this?!” he shouts. “Did everybody know?!”

They all trade glances. “I mean,” says Mike kindly, “not _officially. _He never _said_ anything.”

“It’s just that we’re capable of very basic emotional extrapolation,” Stan agrees, wincing with what could be sympathy but was probably something a little more droll. 

“You can have some time to process,” Richie offers. “I know we all just got each other back. It’s okay. I can wait. It’s not like I’m on any kind of schedule.”

“I’m _married_,” Eddie reminds him, throwing his hands in the air.

Richie nods. “I know.”

“To a _woman._”

“I know that too.”

“Maybe — maybe I don’t have any interest in men, have you thought about that?”

“Extensively, for about thirty years.” 

Eddie blinks. “And?”

Richie sighs, blinking water out of his eyes so he can better see the shape of where Eddie is. “And I love you anyway,” he says. “What do you want me to say? I’m not gonna _force _you to leave your wife, Eds, but you can’t force me to stop being in love with you, so fuck off.”

“No! I’m not fucking off if you’re not fucking off, dickbag!”

“It’s not a competition, you tiny psychopath!” Richie yells. He should have known loving adult Eddie would be equally as irritating as loving him when they were kids. “I’m not trying to _win, _I just love you, that’s all!”

Beside him, Stan pinches the bridge of his nose and mutters, “Jesus Christ.”

“Stanley, you’re Jewish,” Ben reminds him. 

“Any port in a storm, babe,” says Bev.

Eddie yanks Richie forward by the front of his shirt. “Hey,” Richie protests. “Watch the threads man, this is my favorite — ”

He cuts off when Eddie kisses him, hard and fast and in a panic, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Richie’s hands come up to Eddie’s elbows, gripping him tight enough that he can’t pull away. That he can’t change his mind. Dimly, he hears somebody catcalling them, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care who sees them and he doesn’t care if he gets his dumb heart broken and he doesn’t care about anything other than this: that Richie loves him, and he said it. 

Richie loves him and he was brave enough, this time.

Eddie pulls away and glares up at him like he’s daring Richie to be a dick about it, daring Richie to say _haha just kidding I can’t believe you fell for it._ Richie doesn’t. He puts his hand on Eddie’s bloody cheek and draws him in to place a kiss right between his eyes, where his stupid little brow furrows. 

“There isn’t anyone I ever loved half as much as I love you,” he says baldly, and Eddie’s jaw goes slack with surprise, cheeks pinking up.

“I — ” he stutters. “Uh, well — I mean, obviously I — _fuck_, Richie. You can’t just _say_ — ”

Richie pats his head as condescendingly as he can. “It’s okay, Eds, I know you’re overwhelmed with lust for me. I know all the blood has rushed from your brain right down to your — ”

“BEEP BEEP RICHIE,” say the other losers in tandem, and Richie laughs, a bright sound in the bright sun. 

He thinks: _this is a story about being a good son, and a good friend, and_ _nobody dies at the end_. 

Isn’t that incredible?  Isn’t that the dumbest shit you ever heard?

Mike laughs suddenly. “You know,” he says, “all these years I kept looking in the horror section. That’s why none of my rituals worked right.”

“None of your rituals work because they’re bad fucking rituals,” Eddie informs him matter-of-factly, muscling his way in so that Richie is forced to wrap an arm around his shoulder and pull him close into his chest.

“Mike is right, it’s not a horror story,” Ben agrees, ignoring him. He’s looking at Bev, then Mike and Stan and Bill. He looks at Richie. “It never was.”

“What is it then?” asks Stan.

Richie grins over the top of Eddie’s head. He thinks he’s never been so happy. He thinks he cannot yet imagine how happy it is possible to be. 

He says, “Stanley, don’t you read? It’s a story about love.”

_the real end_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then richie prime and the crew defeat It and nobody dies and everybody is happy, the end. 
> 
> [ps: 
> 
> "Wait," says Eddie, sitting in a Chinese restaurant with a fortune cookie in front of him. His eyes snap up to Richie's. "_Wait just a God-damned minute._"
> 
> "Remember that we _all agreed_ that you guys had to leave and come back," Richie reminds him, holding his hands up in self-defense. "It wasn't _my specific idea_."
> 
> Eddie chucks the fortune cookie and leaps across the table, ending up half on Richie's lap and half hovering above him. "I _loved_ you, you asshole!" he shouts. "I _loved_ you, I was going to _stay_!"
> 
> Richie kisses him and doesn't stop until the windows start to rattle.]


End file.
